Art director Fernando Torres has put together a collaborative photographic series that highlights the struggles faced by immigrant LGBTQ+ people.
People who are members of multiple minority groups face unique challenges. It can be exceptionally hard for members of the immigrant community who are also LGBTQ+ to find their place in society. Art director Fernando Torres’ new collaborative photo series, with photographers Rickard Sund, Chris Rinke and Francisco Gomez De Villaboa, reveals this struggle and works to resist the forces that prevent queer immigrants from reaching their full potential.
Fernando Torres grew up as a queer person in a Latinx family in Sweden. Speaking to Dazed, Torres spoke of his difficulties in coming out, “I kept thinking there was no way my Latin parents were going to accept my sexuality”.
He also faced discrimination in wider society, including in the queer community,
“A lot of the gay men I came across had a very strong vision of what I should be like,” he says. “The dom, top, Latino hunk fantasy of their dreams. Which I wasn’t at all. There was a massive lack of representation of any ethnic LGBTQI+ persons and I loathed the fetishising of my ethnicity.”
The Rainbow Project depicts people existing within two persecuted groups, and highlights their resilience and joy in the face of adversity. For the series, each subject styled themselves in order to be portrayed in the way that they wished.
Torres told Dazed,
“I discovered that no matter what our backgrounds are, we all had very similar experiences and feelings of being an outsider. That cultural duality can sometimes be alienating, and when you add sexual preference to that, it can be overwhelming.”
Check out some of the images below:
The Rainbow Project has been shown in Stockholm. Torres hopes to exhibit the series in Berlin and London later in the year.
Subscribe to FIB’s newsletter for your weekly dose of music, fashion and pop culture news!