“I think that the aspiration is one of the truest forms of a person,” queer photographer Sophie Spinelle says. “The constraints that surround us and the ways that the world has clipped our wings doesn’t make our true selves any less real. And I think if people were able to exist in the world the way they want to, they would look more like these portraits every day.”

Spinelle has been a photographer for 16 years, a passion she found after working in policy in New York City by day and doing queer activism by night. “I wasn’t built for networking and heavy research in the same way that the people around me were, and I loved them for being able to nerd out endlessly about the National Voter Registration Act of 1993,” she says. “But I knew there was something else I needed to be doing.”

Spinelle’s photography has depicted subjects such as feminism, body positivity and uplifting the queer community, and it has been featured in places such as The New York Times, Daily Mail, The Huffington Post and many other publications. 

After living in New York and San Francisco for a collective 20 years, she has moved back to her hometown of Eugene. On Feb. 5 at Imperfecta Gallery in Portland, she will debut her first solo exhibition since she’s come home. It is called True to Form and it is a portrait series featuring queer, trans and nonbinary people mostly from Eugene.

She says she created the series as a response to current political attacks on the queer community. “There is a lot being said about queer and trans people right now,” she says. “I have a lot of ghost stories in my life. I’ve lost three wonderful queer friends to suicide. I’m a survivor of a violent hate crime, and I want to make a better world for my kids,” she continues. “It’s devastating to see, especially trans people, being framed as violent extremists when that’s the furthest thing from the truth.” 

“I grew up in a time when there was a lot of fear, and now there’s a lot of fear again,” Spinelle says. “I feel like now I have more of a chance to speak back and find a way to lift people up. When our narratives are being flattened or people are being demonized, I can create a counter narrative to that.”

She says that through deep collaboration and planning between the subject and herself, True to Form gives her subjects agency over how they are represented during a time where that’s not necessarily the case. But planning the shoot with her subject is something Spinelle says is unusual in modern fine art gallery photography. 

“What I’ve discovered over the years is that the deepest, most fruitful images come from listening to and deeply engaging with the person in front of me,” she says, “and so the creative work that I do has become, over the years, so much more about connecting with that person and the conversations before the shoot, and much less about the shoot itself.”

In this same vein, she says that capturing aspiration is key to her portraits. She says that “there aren’t a lot of opportunities for queer people to make our own decisions about how we want to be viewed, what parts of our stories are relevant.”

This is true in her portrait called “Harmony,” in which she spoke with her subject, Felicia Figueroa-Carnine, who expressed the complexities of gender fluidity during their pregnancy. She took two portraits of Figueroa-Carnine, each with three different gendered versions, and all composited to be sitting together. Spinelle says it was important for Figueroa-Carnine to communicate that “there’s not a conflict between the three, that they exist in harmony,” she says. “It was very moving to exist in space with them during that shoot, because they needed to imagine the different parts of self and the interactions between them.” 

Spinelle says that during the shoot, herself, her assistant and Figueroa-Carnine all became emotional together.

She also says shooting the series in Eugene has been very meaningful to her. “This is a real coming home for me. This is the place where I learned who I was, and also where I understood the complexities of being who I was.”

She continues,“part of that is how the community has shown up for me for this project, and that so many people have donated time, donated props, opened up their homes to me.” Shooting this series on her own dime, she says that places like The Eugene Friends Church, The Hybrid Gallery, Framework Studio, Xcape Dance Academy and Shanna Chess Photography all donated their spaces to help make it all possible.

It was a “collective lift, and everybody wanted to see it get done. My collaborators really have been so generous with their time and their trust. And it feels like everything I needed to resolve from my own growing up queer in Eugene,” Spinelle says.

True to Form is on view Thursday, Feb. 5 through Saturday, Feb. 28 at imperfecta Gallery in Portland, 809 NW Flanders Street, open 11 am to 4 pm Wednesdays and Thursdays. A reception is  5 pm to 8 pm Thursday, Feb. 5 and an artist talk is 2 pm Saturday, Feb. 7