Reid Calvert

Image text for photo series, BTS_01, BTS_02, BTS_03

Blue is the only color my heart can see
Giovanni’s Room, Los Angeles, CA
Spring 2023

What is the moment when security measures stop supporting us in place and begin to pin us down? Is the border of self-entrapment and self-preservation so murky, that I cannot differentiate until I’m already entangled? This duality comes to mind in Reid Calvert’s latest images—a triptych of ordinary bushes on the side of the highway, gently covered by lace-like netting. The nets embrace the plants like a spider’s web. Three soft blue lines across its surface function as the only indicator of its man-made materiality.

Having spent a year taking images of people for promotional use, Reid is no stranger to navigating nuanced definitions. Monetization of photos blur the ability to make images that don’t function as content, every Behind the Scenes (BTS) image needing an assigned use value. The impossibility to define yourself as a queer artist when queerness is inherently indefinable. What’s the concrete surface to hold onto? Maybe there just isn’t one?

I go back to blue lines that tether yet seem to point me upward, away from what’s in front of me. The color of calm and still the thing you’re always trying not to be, even blue cannot escape its fate of gradation. I think about Reid grabbing his camera, the very one he’s used on commercial jobs, and can’t help but appreciate the small spotlights on each webbed mass. Each getting their moment sans lighting guys, set crews, the artifice. I am reminded that every seemingly banal photo still holds the essence of a person. I leave the images aware that their subject isn’t arbitrary. They’re self portraits. Selfies, if you must.