How do you confront bigotry, fear, and intolerance? What do you do when you realize that your country is treating you as a second class citizen?
For actor-turned photographer iO Tillet Wright, the answer was to put a human face to the LGBTQ acronym, first with 50 portraits in her native Manhattan, then hundreds more as she traveled across the country. Today the Self Evident Truths Project is on its way to an eventual goal of 5,000-10,000 photographs, dedicated to humanizing “anyone in the United States that is, or EVER has been, anything other than 100% straight.”
Along the way, Tillet Wright has come to firmly believe “familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy.” In this 2011 promotional video, supported by the HRC, she sums up the Project’s mission: “I challenge you to look in the faces of these people and tell them they deserve less than any other human being.”
To get more background on the artist and where the Self Evident Truths Project is today, check out her TEDxWomen talk, released today, at http://www.ted.com/talks/io_tillett_wright_fifty_shades_of_gay.html
You can see all of Tillet Wright’s compelling, unedited photographs on the project’s website: http://selfevidentproject.com/
The Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/SelfEvidentTruthsProject
And you can take a look behind the scenes at the Self Evident Truths blog: http://selfevidentproject.tumblr.com/
A full-length documentary and several exhibits are also in the works.