In May 2017, Sexuality&Art featured Paola Paredes, an Ecuadorian photographer engaged in groundbreaking work centered on ‘disclosure’. Her last photo series, titled Until you Change is the result of an artistic recreation of what happens in underground centers that offer the “cure” for homosexuality in various regions of the country. We are once again given visibility to Paola’s work to protest and contest the decision by a Brazilian federal judge to authorize Evangelical psychologists and clinics to offer services to ‘cure homosexuality’.
The clinics that are the object of Paola photographs are more than religious “clinics” that formally offer rehabilitation to drug or alcohol addiction. They have been studied by the feminist anthropologist Annie Wilkinson in her master dissertation and were made illegal in 2012. However, many of these clinics are still in operation today and constitute a subject of intense debates in Ecuadorian society. Based on the testimony of people that have been subject to these conversion therapies Paredes has recreated a photographic narrative to denounces the human rights abuses prevailing in the clinics whose practices can be portrayed as torture.
Before Until you change Paredes developed another astonishing photo and video series, named Unveiled, in which she documents the day when she told her parents that she is a lesbian.
Image from Unveiled
To know more about Until you Change
To see images of Until you Change