HOME







DRAGGED Dragged is a hybrid print and digital archive documenting New York City’s drag scene: an act of care, resistance, and preservation. Despite drag’s central role in queer culture, it has long been excluded from conventional histories. This project responds to that absence by treating drag not only as performance, but as a living cultural practice that demands to be witnessed, remembered, and valued.

Developed through deep participation in NYC’s drag community, Dragged asks: who gets remembered, and how do we speak for histories that resist permanence?

Drag exists in tension: spectacular yet evanescent, public yet marginalized, joyous yet under threat of erasure. In the current political climate - where drag and queer communities sit at the center of cultural backlash -archiving becomes more than documentation. It becomes a negotiation of power.

Dragged insists that queer expressive culture belongs in the historical record. By foregrounding embodiment, movement, and voice, the project challenges the assumption that archives must be neutral, static, or purely textual. Instead, it proposes an archive that is expressive, participant-centered, and alive.








My process is grounded in proximity rather than observation. I embedded myself within NYC’s drag community: photographing performances, conducting interviews, and listening to performers reflect on gender, politics, labor, and care in the backstage spaces that define nightlife culture. This was not extractive documentation, but collaborative presence.

The project began as a physical object: a photo-driven book combining performance photography with interview excerpts. I explored multiple book forms through extensive prototyping, experimenting with layout systems, text-to-image balance, and binding methods including spiral, perfect binding, and collage-based structures. Through this process, I refined the book into a flat-lay format optimized for both photographic impact and long-term distribution.

The book is intended for circulation within independent bookstores, libraries, and community archives, with ongoing conversations underway with Printed Matter, Mast Books, and Bungee Space. The digital archive will remain publicly accessible to ensure broader reach.










2026