Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography
Website: jordanreznick.com
Jordan Reznick (they/them) is a trans photographer and photo historian born in 1980. Their father, also a photographer, taught them to shoot on a manual camera at age ten, and Reznick went on to earn a BFA in Photography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (2008), followed by an MFA in Photography and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts in San Francisco (2013), and a PhD in Visual Studies from UC Santa Cruz (2020).
Based in San Francisco through the 2010s, Reznick built a body of portrait work centered on queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming subjects, exhibiting at Romer Young Gallery, SOMArts Cultural Center, California College of the Arts, and the San Francisco Public Library’s LGBTQIA Center, and further afield at Aperture Foundation and Handwerker Gallery in New York and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. Their work was supported by a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant and residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Dickerman Prints, and was anthologized in New Queer Photography (Kettler Verlag, 2020). Reznick continues to keep a studio at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco.
Alongside their studio practice, Reznick has built a parallel career as a scholar of the history of photography, focusing on gender, race, and settler colonialism in the medium. They held a 2022–2023 Getty Research Institute/NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship and are now Assistant Professor of Art History, with a concentration in American Studies, at Grinnell College, where they teach courses including American Transgender History and Settler Colonialism in Visual Culture. Reznick is currently completing a book, Landing the Camera: Indigenous Ecologies and Colonial Photography in California, on how Indigenous ecological knowledge and settler-colonial myth shaped nineteenth-century California landscape photography.
Reznick’s photographic practice is built on intimacy rather than distance: “I choose to only photograph people with whom I am intimate or have a shared sense of vulnerability,” they have said, describing their approach as working “from a place that is embedded within my relationships with my subjects rather than as an outside observer.” The resulting portraits — often large-format archival pigment prints — depict queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming sitters with directness and tenderness, pushing back against both the historical invisibility and the narrow, sensationalized visibility of trans people in mainstream media.
That studio work sits in direct conversation with Reznick’s research as a photo historian into how the camera has served projects of gender normativity and settler colonialism. Gallery of Illustrious Queers, for instance, was conceived explicitly as a counter-archive to Mathew Brady’s nineteenth-century Gallery of Illustrious Americans, using the same straightforward portrait conventions once used to model citizenship for white Americans to instead assert the dignity, strangeness, and ordinariness of trans lives.
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