Between 2016 and 2021, J Houston photographed across western Pennsylvania, Michigan, and upstate New York, working with large-format film to slow the photographic process and give weight to the portrayal of trans life in a region that formal narratives rarely treat with care. The title of the resulting book, Tuck and Roll, is reclaimed from a Stonewall-era policing manual, where it named a defensive manoeuvre. Houston lets the phrase carry both of its everyday meanings: the gender presentation tactic used by transfemme and non-binary people, drag performers, and others in the queer community, and the dive-and-roll used to absorb a fall and keep moving.
Across 128 pages, the photographs envision a utopic trans community located in the American Midwest. Houston moves between portraits and domestic landscapes, building the series around implicit connections between people and symbols. Her sitters balance on their forearms, stretch across surfaces, twist their torsos and legs; others meet the lens with a directness that speaks of trust built over time. Around them appear golden and metallic banners, glowing yoga balls, a snake, white pointed shoes, chairs stacked so they do not quite fit together — objects placed, and sometimes placed precariously, so that the mundane tips into something stranger.
The book’s particular quality lies in its refusal of the documentary shorthand usually applied to the American Midwest and to trans subjects within it. Houston does not foreground hardship but builds toward a utopic vision of community, and the sequencing lets portrait and still life answer one another. The accumulation of images suggests a world assembled from the inside, its symbols and domestic settings holding an implicit charge for those who recognize them.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in the sustained, self-aware development of a coherent body of work, and in the care of its making. Choosing a large-format negative is not a neutral technical decision: it changes how long a subject is asked to hold still, and how much detail the final print can carry. GOST Books presents the series in a hardback form, and the result is a photobook whose value sits in the consistency of the project itself.
