"Reassign": Cuban Transgender People in Before and After Images

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week we are publishing a series of "Reassign" by Chilean photographer Claudia Gonzalez about Cuban transgender people. With her project, Gonzalez wanted to show how difficult it is to be not who society wants you to be.

I was interested in photography as much as I can remember, from the very first contact with the camera at the age of seven. At first, I just looked at how it works, then I was in the frame, and then I took the camera myself. Like all lovers, I filmed my immediate environment until my father asked me a question, thanks to which I eventually revised my career on radio and television. He asked: "Why do not you want to devote all the photos to yourself, because this is an occupation that you love most in the world?" And this is true, so I decided to change my life. I managed to work as an assistant with several photographers, and then won a scholarship to get a master's degree in photography in Madrid.

The project "Ressign" was born during one of my travels to Cuba, where I am often thanks to the collaboration with the Spanish photographer José Maria Mellado. Not minimizing the merits of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (Cenesex), which did a lot for the LGBT population of the republic, I was set on fire to show how hard the life of transgender people is until now. In part, I was also moved by a sense of duty to the heroes and responsibility to them for all the difficulties that they have to endure due to a lack of tolerance and understanding from others.

I started shooting "Ressign" in 2011, and I had to do a lot of work to earn the trust of the project’s heroes and Cenesex representatives. However, after a while they themselves realized how important this project is. Initially, I wanted to capture the process of sex change step by step, but then I realized that it was too complicated and intimate. In addition, not everyone reaches this stage, and in addition to transgender people there are, for example, transvestites who go through similar difficulties and face no less discrimination in society.

"Ressign" intentionally consists of diptychs: photos at the same time show the heroes in two images - some before and after the operation for the correction of the biological sex - and symbolize the double life they are forced to live. Transgender people more often than others suffer from the fact that they are not accepted by society and even their own parents, disappointed that their child is not at all what they would like him to be. "Ressign" is an artistic project in its form, but documentary in content. For me it is very important that, looking at these photos, people understand how difficult it is to live two lives with different sexual identities at the same time. However, I also play with the audience - I give them the opportunity to understand which of the characters is more comfortable for the characters and whether it is so important what gender they were born with.