Butch Is Not a Dirty Word: Esther Godoy in Laramie

FIELDNOTES: Sitting in a circle and sharing practice.

On Thursday afternoon, ALCES Community Works brought photographer and curator Esther Godoy to UW Visual Arts for an artist talk and student social. Esther, Australian-born and LA-based, has spent more than a decade making tender, unapologetic portraits of queer people, and for an hour and a half VA 111 became a place to talk about that work over drinks and snacks.

At the center of the conversation was Butch Is Not A Dirty Word, a project that began as a single zine and grew into something much larger: an ongoing portrait practice that keeps asking what it means to be seen on your own terms. Esther walked students through how the project started, and the way a small, self-published act became a body of work about identity, intimacy, desire, and representation.

We wanted this to feel less like a lecture and more like hanging out with an artist whose work you admire, and it did. Students asked about ethics and relationships, and the conversation kept circling back to a few big ideas: how you make the personal universal, what it means to make art inside your own community rather than about it, and the difference between art and content, a distinction that landed hard in a room full of people who’ve grown up making images for feeds. For students in Laramie, having Esther in the room mattered.

Huge thanks to Esther Godoy for making the trip and  to visiting photography prof Marcus Morris at UW Visual Arts for hosting,

Partners: UW Visual Arts, Butch is Not a Dirty Word

Find Esther’s work at butchisnotadirtyword.com and on Instagram at @esthergoodboy.