It all began in 2019, when Fader started a new job as professor of photography at Tulane School of Liberal Arts. His predecessor had left behind piles of obsolete photo equipment, including a Sony Digital Mavica — one of the first commercially successful digital cameras from the late-90s and early 00s. “I had an immediate flashback. My ex-husband’s mother owned one. She was this deep-southern internet junkie who wanted to be like a ‘PFLAG mom’. She would photograph us with it to send to her friends,” says Fader.
Seeing this camera took him back to his own experiences as a queer person in 1999, 16-years before the Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage in all 50 states. “My ex-husband and I didn’t think we would ever be able to marry,” he says. “Thinking about that 20 years on, it’s a no brainer.” Still, 2019 was the year the Trump administration rolled back an array of protections for transgender people. Holding this piece of technology, which marked the beginning of a mass-democratisation of digital image-making, while thinking about the past 20 years of queer history, sparked an idea.
Fader’s research took him back to 1999, the year after Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man, was brutally attacked, tied to a fence, and left to die in a field in Wyoming. At the time, federal hate crime legislation only covered race, creed, or religion. Then-president Bill Clinton urged Congress to expand the list to include sexual orientation, but it took a whole decade for the bill to pass, when Obama successfully signed it into legislation in 2009.
Recognising the turn of the century as a crucial time, Fader used a community-compiled spreadsheet to identify LGBTQ people who had been killed in a hate crime in the years 1999 and 2000. There were over 100 names, but for around 80 percent of the cases, he could find barely any information. “I’ve never done a numbers game on this, but you can definitely see that the more affluent, the more white, the more male — those were the stories that were spoken about.” Fader collaborated with multiple people with PhDs in library sciences; sometimes they managed to find a few sentences, other times, nothing. “One of the things that I had to come to terms with was that queer stories are not only erased by lack of media coverage. Queer erasure happens a second round in the advent of digital technology, and our expectations that all histories are digitised.”
The photographer has spent the last year driving over 15,000 miles across 40 states, to visit the crime scene of these murders, documenting them with the Sony Digital Mavica. The resolution is low — “this idea that photography brings visibility, is both a truth and a failure in the images,” says Fader. “It attempts to provide truth, but it fails. Some of the stories that I was able to compile alongside them also lets you know that oftentimes, it was the best I could do.”