Alexander Coggin and his long-suffering muse/husband discuss life in front of the lens

The photographer Alexander Coggin has always had something an uncompromising approach. Whether he’s photographing a load of ears, the intricacies of family life, or Italian-American kitchens, with his trademark high-exposure flash and ability to capture the strangest in-between moments, he has a unique way of making the mundane simultaneously intimate, confronting and surreal. And no one knows this better than his husband Michael Norton.

Together for 17 years, Michael has been Alexander’s greatest and longest-standing muse. Featuring in hundreds upon hundreds of photographs – taken at any given moment – together the pair have created a photographic archive that transverses everything from beach holidays to bath times, via more difficult moments, of traumatic dissociation and putting loved pets down. This complex mix has come together to create a series that feels truthful to its core – celebrating life, and companionship – in whatever shape or form it takes as each day comes.

Alexander and Michael’s ability to create something so intimate together rests on a fine balance. Their meeting within art and shared passion for theatre craft, a core foundation of trust, and neither having fixed ideas of the other: who they are and what they can be. But what sets this archive aside is its inherent queerness, documenting a relationship outside of the fixed ideas of relationships that heteronormative standards have fixed so rigidly in place. Read on to find out more about the defining series, and why its title Mike might not be as innocuous as it seems.

It’s Nice That: It would be great to start off where this all began. Alex, you mentioned that Mike bought you your first camera. So Mike can you tell us about buying Alex his first camera, and what compelled you to do so?

Michael Norton: Alex, you know what I want to say first.

Alexander Coggin: He hates the title.

MN: My name is not Mike.

INT: Oh!

AC: His name is Michael, and he likes to be called Michael.

INT: OK that is good to know!

MN: Alex can tell you more about why he called this archive Mike. But I hate it. And I resent Alex for calling it that.

AC: Mike is such like a hetero nickname. People I grew up with named Michael all go by Mike, my older brother is called Mike, and I just think it’s such a strange, borderline ironic choice to call you Mike, so it’s the first thing I thought of when naming the series. I thought it was just so appropriate.

MN: I hate it.

AC: So his name is Michael, we’ve cleared that up.

MN: The question was about buying Alex’s first camera, is that right?

INT: Yes.

MN: So we were living in Chicago in the aughties and that was a time when both Alex and I were figuring ourselves out artistically and creatively. Alex and I had both started in theatre school as performance makers and I kept more on that track, while Alex was kind of straying, wandering. I wouldn’t say he was lost, but just wandering, trying on different mediums. And the camera was a Christmas gift – like really quite an expensive Christmas gift. I guess I just had a thought – it wasn’t like ‘I see that he’s a visionary!’ – it was more like ‘this is something Alex can control, quickly, efficiently, and he doesn’t need any collaborators’.

AC: Not needing collaborators is such a key point.

MN: Alex was working in customer support, answering phones all day in the Loop in downtown Chicago, it was so obviously not his soul’s purpose. And he would kinda wander around the Loop during his lunch breaks while he worked there. So the thinking was that the camera would help document that off-time.

AC: I think probably the immediacy was what you were intuiting. It feels like in some sense it was like giving me a journal and a pen. I just feel like I remember thinking that the theatre in Chicago was so much lamer than I thought it was going to be. I was so disappointed with the landscape.

INT: What were the first few days with the camera like Alex?

AC: Well, I guess it was around Christmas time. I don’t like to read instruction manuals, I’m not that kind of person. So the first moments with it, just going shot-to-shot were super organic, and I figured out how different settings can mediate reality differently.

INT: So at what point did you realise you were particularly drawn to photographing Michael? What made him a good muse?

AC: Well he was there, firstly. He handed me my camera which I immediately turned around and pointed at him. But I also instantly noticed how, when I pointed the camera at Michael, there was no, like, changing of behaviour on his part, he seemed a little bit unflappable. Not feeling the need to smile.

INT: Michael, how did you feel in front of the camera? Did it take some getting used to or is it something that came naturally to you?

MN: Um, I don’t remember ever having a time when I resisted having my photo taken. There have been like maybe one or two moments that I can remember where I would specially tell Alex, ‘Don’t take a fucking picture of me right now’.

AC: But I do have those pictures.

MN: I think it felt pretty easeful from the beginning. He’s not going to ask me to do anything differently, every once in a while maybe like a slight adjustment. But I think really Alex is more interested in capturing whatever essence you’re experiencing in that moment. Maybe you remember differently Alex but I remember from the beginning I was pretty available to be looked at.

AC: Well you were making theatre, making performance – so, of course.

MN: When Alex started Brothers and Others, started photographing my family, he would bring out his camera around family events, and for a lot of them it was really difficult to avoid, you know, putting on a face. Alex takes very confronting, oftentimes, objectively, demeaning images of parents yelling at kids, or parents on iPhones or people drunk, things where it’s not the most flattering. But that's exactly what’s happening.

AC: I think you were a good example in showing them that it’s best to not do anything. It’s much more simple than you think, just don’t change your behaviour.

INT: So recently you’ve been going through this massive archive, is this something you’ve done together, and what does it look like? Obviously you’ve whittled thousands of images down to hundreds, what has that process looked like for you?

AC: Well I spent weeks going through everything that I thought I had, I actually had no formal organisation process before. Our dear friend Gem Fletcher, a little while ago, said “you’ve got to do something with your archive, because the photos of Michael - they’re all so different.” So I went through everything everything, even just raw files because I’ve never deleted anything. So multiple hard drives taking many weeks. Which was actually really difficult and sort of whiplash-ish and emotional. I went through 15 years of raw data and pulled about 300 photos of Michael I was happy with. I’d say 75 per cent of that 300 were already developed and ‘fixed’ images that I was happy with and 25 per cent are ‘new’ images that went overlooked whenever I originally made them. Then, for the purposes of sharing this archive with you, we whittled them down to 33 or so. I was lucky enough to have an outside eye in Gemma, who helped me make a really tight edit, because I have such an emotional attachment to all of the images. It’s difficult for me to see the value of shot A over shot B. Putting them together and pairing them down, I think, should be difficult for the maker.

But – the 33 we sent over – considered together, they definitely have a vibe. They all feel like such a specific moment, so crystallised and concrete and different from one another, all indexical to their own energy. The images in this edit – they all share this, sort of, in-between emotional moments. One emotion crossfading with another emotion. I like making works where people are mid-thought, mid-sentence, mid-emotion. Like in good theatre, where you get to see emotional transition.

INT: Obviously celebrations like Valentine’s Day are pretty heteronormative, and you’ve mentioned how rare queer love archives are. Why do you think it’s important to see stories like yours immortalised in photography? Where do you think your series stands in the rich but fairly small legacy of queer archiving?

AC: This is on the top of my mind so I’ll bring it up – I just watched a really good documentary last night about the AIDS activist and political cartoonist Daniel Sotomayor, part of Act Up Chicago. His partner was the playwright Scott McPherson. Michael, do you remember the play Marvin’s Room?

MN: Of course.

AC: Yeah – Daniel Sotomayor’s partner was the writer of that, and they were together for such a short amount of time before AIDS took them both out in the early 90s. We’re so lucky to be born in this time and place as queer people. Our existence would not be as easy if we were born just one or two generations before. By the time we got married, it was legal to walk into any courthouse in the United States and get married, yet I’m constantly thinking about how hard it’s been for American queers that came before us, certainly pre-Stonewall. And photographing queerness – our ways and relationships – these photographs could jeopardise your job, out you to unwelcome families, be used as blackmail – police used to call that ‘fairy shaking’. Photographs and public archives were just much more dangerous and could create un-safety in everyday heteronormative structures. So I think an archive between two people that are in a long term queer relationship, it’s one of the first times that we can have these artefacts that feel consistent and visible and unafraid.

MN: I would also add that part of the energy that is, for me, communicated between the subject and artist here, is an uncompromising risk. Alex and I have very little relationship of proprietary, or appropriateness.

AC: I actually took out very many nudes in this edit, knowing websites like yours would probably pause to show full-frontal male nudity.

MN: Well so we are, in a way, still understanding the danger of intimate images in the hands of people or organisations outside of our relationship, outside of the queer community. And I think that speaks to a wider value that feels like the locus of our own queer identity, that I think you don’t always get when it’s a heterosexual couple narrative. When I see these photographs I see that there’s eroticism between us, that part of what Alex is capturing is desire, and compassion, and sometimes an antagonistic relationship in the photographic subject and artist. Like I’m on the floor having a panic attack and Alex gets his camera out, and I’m like “Are you fucking kidding me?”. I think for me all of that sits in the wider spectrum of the way we experience queerness within our relationship. We don’t have a conditioned narrative of how we are meant to experience the kinetic photographic space between us. And I don’t know nearly as much as Alex does, but it feels like that’s an important narrative to bring into the gaze of photographic authorship.

AC: I just want to say one more thing about queerness in these images. Michael is a cis-gender male, and by no means non-binary, but there is something in these photographs shot to shot where Michael has, over the course of his life, vibrated with different gender expressions. And in that way they feel very performative to me. The medium through which we met was theatre and because that is our background, our shared language, I think that’s also informed the performative feeling of different gender expressions. Both in the photographs and in our lives. We don’t construct the setting, but I think we work together to construct a gender vibration.

INT: Yeah that is definitely my favourite thing about the series is seeing your style and fashion change, sometimes it even looks like a different person, and then you see your face and your like, oh it’s Michael!

AC: I also think that’s the gift of queerness, as opposed to what we used to just call being ‘gay’. We’re boundaryless in terms of where we can go and who we can be and who we can love or fuck, and I think these photographs also feel boundaryless to me.

INT: What do you think it says about your relationship that you’ve been able to create this series? Personally, I feel like it shows such a unique level of intimacy and understanding and comfort with one another. But is there anything specific about your personal relationship that’s allowed it to flourish?

AC: I remember one time talking to Michael’s stepdad – this was back in Chicago while working at a call centre. I had a day job and had just started making work during lunch breaks and after work. And he couldn’t really wrap his head around this idea that, OK, you have your job, and then you make art, and that’s also a job, but it doesn’t pay you any money? He wasn’t an artist and had genuine confusion about what art-making was for in a person’s life. And so when I look at this archive, built bit-by-bit, shot-by-shot, I’m like: this is what it’s for! We have a solidified archive that is the art-making space between us. There’s something about the intimacy between our relationship that includes art-making I guess, or making a healthy space for creation.

MN: Alex and I met in art, we met literally in a class debating the merits of different directorial styles of twentieth century theatre directors. That was our first flirt! So it has always been art as the thing that we are co-creating between us. You know, we’re in the process right now of having a child and we have always said up until now that our first child has been artistic practice. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what is my work and what is his. We are both speaking to each other’s projects when they’re happening, however they’re happening, we’ve always had that open dialogue. For me, if it’s in service to art and creation, I’ll sacrifice anything for it. You know, if Alex told me it was necessary for me to go lay face down in some mud, I would do it, because we are in service of this thing that we’re co-creating together. And it brings us together. If nothing else, we have creation.

MN: The other photo I was also going to mention…

AC: I know which one you’re going to mention!

MN: Tell me which one it is then.

AC: The one with the foot in front of your face?

MN: No! That’s just like, fuck you, what an asshole.

AC: That was on our honeymoon.

MN: No, the one that feels most wow, is I guess the one of me in the window. Cause I look at that and I’m like, who is that?

AC: Mhm! This is why I think it’s so important to go back to our performance roots. I totally agree. Who is that?

MN: I wasn’t at the time putting on a character. If I look at these through the lens of different queer experiences or how they’re alluding to different experiences with gender, and the dynamic of subject/object, that’s one where I really feel like there was some, almost confronting masculine energy coming out of me at the time. I look at that photo and I’m like… I look like I could kill someone. So it’s a little surprising. And in some of these photos there’s a bit of that eroticism. There’s also the uncensored version of that photo that didn’t make the cut.

AC: Yeah I much prefer that one. There are some nude pictures that feel super important to the whole of this archive.

INT: What does the future look like for you both right now?

AC: As Michael said, we’re putting a fertilised embryo from a queer donor into a separate and also queer surrogate in April, so we’re orienting to becoming parents. And there was something sort of about ‘assessing’ your spouse, something about going through the archives before we become three, it was really nice to assess and look at how far we’ve come since it’s just been the two of us. There’s one where Michael’s in the kitchen, and he’s holding his two nephews, and there’s something about that one that feels so queer futuristic about it. It gave me some sort of visual representation, some mood board of what Michael would look like as a parent, it was almost like a crystal ball moment. I’m really glad I have an item from that time, this is a visual representation of what our future could be.

INT: Yeah my first thought, obviously not knowing you both personally, was that they were your children.

MN: Good, it worked!

AC: In that way what’s really striking about the project for me is that it’s a project about the past, and it’s a project about the present, but it’s also about the future. I’m looking through this archive and making sure I have a partner who can handle being a parent, and making sure I can handle being a parent!

MN: And, I’m just going to be totally candid, you also have a subject that enjoys being looked at.

AC: I’m the opposite of this.

INT: Oh that’s interesting, so it couldn’t be the other way around?

AC: No…

MN: Actually! ALEX!

AC: What?

MN: We have to go out. Isn’t it our anniversary?

AC: …

MN: Today!

AC: Oh shit. Yes! Wow, we both would have just slept on that.

MN: Is it 17 years now? We met in 2007 and had our first date today! 17 years!

AC: Let’s go out to dinner!

MN: Okay. But you’re sick!

INT: I love that. The perfect ending.