A freak is not a fact.

It is a fantasy; an amalgamation of assumptions, constraints, and performative gestures so ingrained in the public imagination that they come to be accepted as reality. We often lose awareness of freakishness as performance, particularly when the person in question is non-white or feminine-presenting. This process of enfreakment has worked on no other group more determinedly and successfully, however, than the disabled.

Here, I seek to erode the process of enfreakment through a series of portraits of historical disabled circus performers. These eleven women made a spectacle of their physical difference during the height of the freak show in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In their roles as freaks, they were not people, but rather simultaneously so much more and so much less than people: myths, symbols, beasts, and sometimes even literally objects.

It is no coincidence that freak shows exploded in popularity during an era of Western industrial, scientific and colonial expansion. The freak came to stand in contrast to whatever the audience needed them to, and in doing so, cemented ideals of 'normality' in Victorian society that still pervade today: the productive worker, the statistically average human, the civilized white citizen.

The subjects of these portraits are not here to perform or to please, to incite pity or awe. They are often busy in tasks of personal enrichment or private thought. In contrast to a face-to-face interaction, viewing portraiture enables a viewer to 'stare,' engaging in the contemplation of difference in an unhurried, non-confrontational, and non-harmful way. Playing with stylistic conventions of traditional portraiture, these portraits ask us to challenge the arbitrary categories we put in place to make distinctions between ourselves.