WE TRIED TAKING HEADSHOTS

An anthropological exploration: 

Written by Kasun Gunawardana

A study of human dynamics through body, gesture, costume, and image. 

It documents how queerness reorganises labour, power, care, and beauty as lived truth.

This photographic series emerges from our lived experience of queer domesticity, collaboration, and chosen kinship. Created in dialogue with my co-founder and collaborator, the work positions our shared home in Barcelona as an anthropological site.

one in which gender, labour, intimacy, and care are actively negotiated rather than assumed.

Drawing on visual anthropology and queer humanities, the images examine how everyday actions function as cultural gestures. Domestic labour, adornment, rest, and physical effort are fluid. Disrupting binary understandings of masculinity and femininity. 

These dynamics are not staged as role reversal, but as relational practices shaped by trust, intimacy, and mutual support. What queer chosen family may look like. And this is us, as we are. 

Satire and play operate as critical methodologies within the series.

Scenes of domestic life are intentionally heightened to expose the constructed nature of normative gender scripts, while moments of reflection, through regal portraiture and demon inspired drag, extend the inquiry into public visibility.

Referencing Sri Lankan folkloric iconography, the demon figure embodies mischief, protection, and excess, reflecting how queer bodies are often read as both disruptive and symbolic.

This work treats queer family not as an alternative structure, but as a valid cultural system.

one that generates its own rituals, aesthetics, and forms of knowledge. The images function as documentation, asserting lived experience as theory.