Luna's Biography:
This story begins as it was told by my mother that I was conceived in Detroit, Michigan with the sounds of Marvin Gaye's Motown playing in the background. It was on my parents return to the Bronx, New York that I was born in 1972. Both my parents are of Puerto Rican descent, and I believe it is the diversity of Puerto Rico's many cultural traditions that has helped me survive, and has kept my spirit strong.
After growing up in the South Bronx and later moving to Lancaster Pennsylvania for a “better life”, it was then that I discovered late night classic movies on PBS. I was especially interested in Marlene Dietrich movies in which were directed by Josef Von Sternberg. Josef Von Sternberg's films ignited an interest within me for shadows and light. Von Sternberg had a way of making every scene look like a perfect dream. My world became the set of a Von Sternberg movie. I wanted so badly to make everyone look like Marlene Dietrich. My father, noticing this interest, gave me his favorite Minolta 35mm camera. He told me to study Von Sternberg's lighting, if that is what I liked and then “Aim, Shoot and don't shake the camera.”
My first photographs were self-portraits and images of my sister in poses that I saw Dietrich and Hepburn do in George Hurrell images. I started to borrow from old movies. I simply threw myself head-on into experimenting with lighting and costumes. I painted with light, creating a legend. I became fascinated with beauty; I fell in love with the magic of photography. Photography became my escape. I began photographing friends like they were my movie stars. The world of make believe slowly became our reality. I photographed my friends at the same time that they were creating their fantasies into their outer reality. Many were going through difficult changes in their lives with gender and sexuality. Some of them were changing from male to female and vice versa, and through my photography I helped them find themselves. Discovering who they were on the inside, I was able to develop as an artist.
After graduating from the Harvey Milk high school I wanted to embark on a career in photography and the arts. Confused about my future I continued with my portrait photography. In 1991 I began to work for QW magazine, a gay monthly magazine as an intern in the layout department. There I was introduced to David LaChappelle by Erich Conrad. QW magazine was working with David LaChappelle on a story based on gay Cuba. I began to assist him in the darkroom printing his black and white images of Cuba for QW magazine. With David, I learned to go forward and take chances with my creative mind. We became friends, sharing personal stories about our lives and photography. In my eyes, David was and is a genius. His colors and lust for photography still remain a strong influence in my life and in my work.
For a long time I felt disconnected with my true self. I lived a life covered up in a smile that was not real. I had to hide true feelings, death, hurt, and loss. Many of the young people I came out with into the NYC gay scene in the late 80's exist only in my memory because AIDS took them away from me. The kids today do not understand what AIDS is. They do not understand the pain and loss we had to go through in the 80's and early 90's.
The loss of a whole new generation wiped out! I have seen more death than my parents and grand parents put together. I've learned to accept this, with each death I was more determined to live for my friends and family. I photographed them as they wished mostly very sensual, glamorous, haunting portraits and at times innocent, isolated and brutal. Each session was a masquerade, a metaphorical party conveying provocative messages from chapters of our own lives, revealing a fabricated celebration of life, a life that was actually not promised.
By the mid nineties I began losing more friends to AIDS and gay bashings. Some were murdered simply because society did not see them as transgender women. I realized that I was losing a part of my history, so I began photographing my friends as they moved through my life. I wanted to create a visual diary as a tribute to them, to keep alive the memories of my friends, many of which never even reached adulthood. I explored the mockery of masculinity and femininity, contradictions about sexuality and gender. Telling us more about the architectural reality of life than any gender or sexuality alone, deconstructing traditional gender roles and beauty. Drag queens, butches, gay boys, bangee boys, hustlers, porn stars, and fem queens were treated like Hollywood stars through my lens. My lens not just helped make great portraits but helped capture an era of the divine gay 1990's. I became a desperate historian of beauty, desire and death. I became fascinated by the essential quality of existing, dreaming and acting.
Excited with my experiences, I had my first exhibition at the Hetrick-Martin Institute. This work revolved around glamour, tributes and legends from the house/ ball community and gay club kids. I met Nan Goldin in 1993 at this exhibition. We became instant friends and instant admires of each others work. She described my work as comparable to her own, drawing parallels between my work and hers. Later, I would study her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and this led to an exhibition at the Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center (which she helped to support). Working with Nan Goldin has been one of my favorite times in my life. In 1995, I became a member of the Visual AIDS Archive Project and studied at the School of Visual Arts.
At this point my work was suddenly published in HX Magazine, QV Magazine, BLUE, and VIBE, OUT, The New York Times, Time Out, and the cover of Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent for Avon Books. My work has been included in photography exhibitions at art in General (NYC), Paul Morris Gallery (NYC), National Arts Club (NYC), Thread Waxing Space (NYC), Light Works Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery (Syracuse, NY), The Seagram Gallery (NYC). My installation work has been shown at the Boston Center for Arts (Boston) and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC). In 1996, I helped to create The House of Frame-by-Frame Fierce, an animation company using photo cutout animation along with filmmaker and artist Shawn Atkins. Frame-by-Frame Fierce ran animation workshops at various youth agencies in New York City. The House of Frame by Frame Fierce has grown into an especially unique house of animation and imagination; creating youth media for a generation.
In the 1990's MTV, VH1, Telemundo and PBS have all done documentary segments on my work and life and I continue to work on countless media projects. Some of my work was recently featured at the Arnold and Shelia Aronson Galleries, Parsons School of Design, along side artists David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Frank Moore, John Dugdale and Keith Haring. Portions of my work are a part of the 2001 Permanent Collection at Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University. I was also featured in OUT Magazine's OUT 100 issue, as one of the LGBT community achievers of 2001 for my work with The House Frame-by-Frame Fierce. I also teach full time photography to the youth at The Hetrick-Martin Institute; Home of the Harvey Milk High School.
I am currently working on the documentary movie “How Do I Look” (www.howdoilooknyc.org) with director Wolfgang Busch, and a video project based on the Original DL's The Life of Transgender Men and Women along with the Julie Joyce Story. I am also currently working on my first Photography Book which will include diary entrees and a history of images from 1986-2005.
