Positions

Presenting all fifty photographs from K8 Hardy’s cult Position Series alongside unseen images, this book demonstrates a vivid and influential approach to queering the portraiture genre.
Multimedia artist K8 Hardy uses photography in her Position Series (2007-12) to explore identity as performance and construction. Hardy used herself, her sister, and mannequins, styled in eclectic clothes, wigs, and makeup, to suggest personas outside normative categorisations of identity and gender expression, in tension with the ordinary domestic or urban spaces in which they are pictured. In the darkroom, Hardy superimposed bows, glasses, bras, and the spectral outlines of bodies over these portraits: analogue interventions that expose the photograph as a deliberate construction rather than fixed truth. Positions presents all fifty photographs from the cult series plus additional unseen images, cataloguing Hardy’s pathbreaking body of work in the context o