For the past eight years, Davis has been photographing her family: her gay father, his lifelong partner, mother and stepfather as well as other gay-parented families. This project, “Families on Stage,” features 42 Boston area gay-parented families taken during Family Week in Provincetown, MA over the course of 4 years (2002-2005). Taken on stage at the local town hall, each portrait serves to put forth a much-needed candid glimpse of the gay family, which recently shifted demographically to the suburbs. Davis plays with expectations of documentary work with her frank compositional choices and sheer repetition. Davis’s project takes on increased meaning given the ruling on gay marriage in our state, but also speaks to how we all picture ourselves as and within family.

A native of Boston’s South End, Davis received her MFA in Photography and Computer Arts at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1998 and then taught at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ). She has also taught photography and new media in Boston at Massachusetts College of Art, Emerson College, and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Involved with many activist and support groups, Davis’s work with gay-parented families has been featured in countless solo and group exhibitions and gay, lesbian, and transgendered targeted publications. In 2005, she received one of five individual grants in photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Through photography I investigate the possibilities for contemporary families to construct gender, sexual and class identities beyond the traditions of the nuclear family. For eight years, I have placed my gay and straight-parented homes at the center of my inquiries into the “familial gaze.”

My parents are the product of the sixties sexual and feminist movements and AIDS Epidemic. Such cultural vantage points have informed my personal and political notions of sexual identity, family and community. The multiplicity of subjective experience has informed how I look at photography’s documentary canon, which traditionally encompasses white, male, and western viewpoints. I hope my work serves as an antidote or alternative to such notions of documentary photography and documentary photographer.

My interest in the photographic representation of gay family culture began specifically with gay men raising children. The photographic project has extended to a curiosity about the reworking of not only gender but also ethnic, religious and cultural/class roles for family, community member. Unexpectedly, so far in this body of work, it is class, more so than gender, that has emerged as a defining family social structure.

Within the last five years, the project has extended to include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender parented families. “Families on Stage” family portraits were made during Family Week, 2002-2005, a popular annual public LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered) gathering in Provincetown, MA. Family Week attracts hundreds of families from New England and all over the country, as vacation destination but also a time for parents and children to share time and stories, the weeklong event is organized by FamilyPride Coalition, COLAGE, and this year, GLAD. (Please see links for more information). The Families on Stage series also function as an archive for not only the families sitting for the camera but also for the coalitions who make the annual congregation possible. Both unique organizations, FamilyPride and COLAGE provide a support system for LGBT families while funding and compiling the needed interdisciplinary research on LGBT parented families and community.