Liam Mackenzie

Special Interest Category Winner: LGBTQ

Canada

Series Title: Familiar Faces

Series: Familiar Faces

Familiar Faces is a self-portrait series exploring, reviving, and expressing the qualities that I’ve numbed and hidden for a significant portion of my life. Growing up as a queer, disabled child, I created a bad habit of repressing qualities of myself. I would repress my sexuality out of fear. I would keep my disabled jaw silent to avoid people asking me “Why do you talk like that?” The repression was so strong I didn’t recognize who I was. It has taken years to repair the disconnection that I forged with those two pieces of myself, and I am still working on it. However, as I work on accepting those qualities, I still didn’t feel whole. I’ve examined my actions and why I do certain things and what I gathered is that I am still indulging these bad and damaging habits. Not with defining qualities, but rather with smaller pieces that define who I am as a person. Familiar Faces is a platform for me to explore and reconcile with those smaller qualities and bring them out of the dark.