Checkered Pride
Daniel Eugene Kaminski | United States
Organization: Daniel Eugene Photography
Photographer: Daniel Eugene Kaminski
Organization: Daniel Eugene Photography
Exhibit Title: Checkered Pride
Location: United States
Checkered Pride is a photo-documentary project investigating short track stock car racing and drag performance cultures in the United States. I myself am both a racecar driver and a drag queen. The janus-faced reality of my experience in—and as—both cultures grants me the dual perspective of being insider and outsider to each world.
Using photography I cross-examine these environments by highlighting what I experience as sympathetic overlaps, just dressed differently—namely rebellion, flamboyance, pride, identity and freedom as characterzing essences defining both realms. More importantly I am documenting each environment on its own terms, as its own phenomenon of Humans Being.
Checkered Pride is both social impact project as well as a reflection of my own adventure—my pilgrimage and personal effort to understand better and be both the masculine motor oil of my racecar driver Being and the homosexual holy water of my drag performer Self—a reconciliation that has been ongoing since I was a kid, and defines so much of who I am.
Daniel Eugene is a photographer, poet, visual artist, and drag performer from Bethany, CT. He is a recent graduate of the one-year certificate program in Documentary Practices at the International Center of Photography in New York City.
Eugene is an autodidact and bibliophile. In 2014 started working closely with photographer and designer John T. Hill, who has since become his lifelong mentor and friend. Inspired by Hill’s example, Eugene began devoting himself to photography, approaching the medium as an auto-biographical extension of the written journal he has kept since he was a teenager.
Eugene engages the camera as the artist’s opportunity to create an individual’s anthropology of their lifetime. He believes the artist’s function is to fascilitate the evolution of human consciousness and that an artworks success is measured by its faculty to induce a person’s thinking of their own thoughts.
Eugene currently lives in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens and is studying the culture of Manhattan affluence while eking a living serving tables at Empire Diner in Chelsea.
He photographs and writes every day.
203.444.8538
daniel.eugene.photography@gmail.com
Instagram: @daniel.eugene.photography
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