For the debut of ICP’s Incubator Space, (ICP alumni ‘22) Mackenzie Calle presented a work-in-progress installation of her project The Gay Space Agency.
Yuvan Kumar: What inspired you to create The Gay Space Agency?
Mackenzie Calle: Ever since I was a kid right through high school, I was interested in space. And so, I think some of the initial ideas for this specific project had started before my time at ICP. And then when I was here, we were asked to develop a long term project. The ideas around something in space, queer space, Sally Ride and astronauts really started to take shape.
I knew it was a topic I was really interested in, specifically the history and research of it. I found out in 2021 that Sally Ride, the first known queer astronaut, had a female partner of 27 years and kept that fact private until she came out in her obituary. And I also found that early astronauts had to take a heterosexuality test, the Rorschach inkblot test, and see feminine anatomy in the inkblots. So, these two points were the catalyst for the whole project.
There are two parts to the project. The first speaks to the queer history of astronauts at NASA or the history of their exclusion, which incorporates a lot of NASA archival images. Some of my own images often incorporate a lot of text kind of overlaid to talk about and to incorporate a lot of the documentation research that I found. But I kept going back to a quote from Sally Ride that was: You can't be what you can't see. And I was really interested in imagining queer people in space and actually visualizing the thing that I wish existed in the archive. So I then was like, alright, let me just start to create some of them. And so that's how the imagined Gay Space Agency was born.
YK: How did it start to come together?
MC: The very first thing I did for the project in November of 2021. I flew down to Florida to photograph a SpaceX launch. I didn’t know what the project could be, all I knew is I needed to get close to those spaces to figure it out.
I took photos of the launch, the museum, and the space suits there. And then I began to go through NASA archives—all public domain—to develop and create a visual language that represents the history.
I found a group called Out Astronaut who promoted queer people in space by funding a queer person to go through some initial astronaut training with their program. And very fortunately, they agreed to let me in when I told them what I was doing. So those were the first images I had of queer astronauts—visualizing the training and using some of the archival images.
I also got to experience a gravity offset machine, which is the closest to Lunar or Martian gravity that you can get on Earth. I was in a spacesuit with a harness with a constant counterweight.
YK: What were some of your inspirations for the project?
MC: I’ve always loved Cristina de Middel’s work The Afronauts, which is a big inspiration to me. And I think that gave me a lot of motivation because it was a work that I loved visually and also it was a book involving astronauts and imagining space.
And I think my favourite photo, ever, is Jonas Bendiksen’s Satellites. It’s surreal and joyful with the kids tied to space and hope. And it feels like the past and present are meeting.
YK: Tell me a bit about your process in experimenting and creating the body of the work?
MC: A lot of it was me just really trying to tell myself, there's no rules with how I want to do this. And so just playing around and experimenting. And I think that the joy in photography. It probably took me until I was like two years into it even before I understood that it was like two parts: the history and the whole imagined world.
A lot of inspiration came from the actual history and from the archival images themselves. And kind of trying to combine all of the facts and the story and figure out how best to say it and to tell it.
We brought two of the aspiring astronauts, Brandy Nunez and Isaac Charles Anderson, to New York and kind of recreated a training session in a studio. I was also the prop person and we made spacesuits. So we made a lot of these things to try and bring it to life. And then some of the other photos were taken when I was documenting Out Astronaut, but are now kind of seen as fictionalized in the gay space agency. So like, the close up of Brandy in the spacesuit came about that way. And same thing with the close up of the glove, which is part of the spacesuit.
YK: What are you hoping that people take away from the project?
MC: I think just for anyone to see there's a lot of hope in the world. I think when everything feels so difficult right now, there are still people doing so much good work and passionate about fighting for who they are and what they want.
Space has always been the place above any politics or it's always been almost an escape of like looking up at the skies, that's a place without any rules.That's a place beyond borders. And that's a place where like anything is possible. And I think right now there's so many negative narratives around space. So it's important to see there's also a lot of benefits to it. Because it's ultimately a place of science. And it’s a place of international cooperation.
That, to me is really intriguing, inspiring and kind of has endless curiosity for me.
YK: What are you working on currently?
MC: I’m working on a project called the World's Biggest Analogue. For two weeks, I’ll be documenting what it’s like to be living on the moon or Mars in a simulated environment. And so I'll be with a crew of likely five other people in isolation for 2 weeks, documenting that journey as a crew member embedded in this simulation.
And so it's really a psychological but also science research study of what it could be like for humans to live on another planet.
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Mackenzie Calle is a freelance photographer and National Geographic Explorer based in Brooklyn. Her work typically focuses on long-term stories that investigate systems of power, science, and queer issues. Led by extensive research, she is interested in storytelling that utilizes original photography, archival material, and multimedia approaches to illuminate our past and imagine future possibilities.
She is the recipient of the 2024 World Press Photo in Open Format for North and Central America, was selected for Magnum Foundation’s Counter Histories Fellowship, and was a finalist for the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards, amongst others.
Her work has been published in outletBios that include National Geographic, The Washington Post, GAYLETTER, and The Wall Street Journal and has been exhibited in places that include Fotografiska Stockholm, Photoville, Somerset House, and Pride Photo Festival.
Mackenzie is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and was awarded the Director’s Fellowship to attend ICP’s Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism program. She was also selected to Eddie Adams Workshop XXXV. Prior to her freelance career, she was a Photography Producer with NBCUniversal.
Image: Mackenzie Calle
