Luna Sweetheart: A Truly Beautiful Thing, Michael Grace DeCristo Explores Identity & Self With Photography
☆ By PATRICK ZAVORSKAS ☆
All photos provided by Michael Grace DeCristo
“IT TURNS OUT EVERYWHERE YOU GO, YOU TAKE YOURSELF, THAT’S NOT [A] LIE,” — this is the mantra of photographer and multidisciplinary artist Michael Grace DeCristo. Inspired by this line from legendary singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey’s song “Fuck It, I Love You,” DeCristo captures the vulnerability, fragileness, and raw nature of life through shared personal experiences. Opening their life to the viewer, DeCristo allows you enter a world that is so beautiful, all on its own. Each photo acts as a vessel in understanding their relationships with not only those around them, but with themselves, their community, and their views on gender and sexuality. Their work became an ephemera of queerness, resilience, and strength within a time of great uncertainty.
Once an angsty and angry teenager from the outskirts of a small rural town in North Carolina, DeCristo emerges on the other side as a renowned and deeply talented artist whose works have been exhibited in Brooklyn, Chicago, Long Island, and North Carolina, and has been published in numerous online and print publications including Playboy, Vogue Italia PhotoVogue, and (our very own) The Luna Collective Mag. An incredible journey and a story that is just beginning to unfold before our eyes, each chapter is a snapshot and memory of what is to come.
Michael Grace DeCristo is the person that you wish you could be.
They appeared in front of my laptop screen one warm afternoon embodying sheer confidence. Sitting on the balcony of a hotel in New York City, they shined from the natural light creeping in around them — a smile immediately flashing across their face as we greeted each other. Dressed in a yellow tank with purple flowers delicately floating within the pattern, their curly brown hair framed their face as they pushed it back, resembling the Madonna enthroned — happily awaiting our conversation. I would be lying if I didn’t say I felt as if I could only pale in comparison. I wondered if this is what other people felt like when meeting them.
From what I knew about Michael Grace DeCristo before our interview, they were a multidisciplinary artist and photographer working behind the Instagram handle @m.decristo. Their work was something that pleasantly graced my feed: ethereal and dreamy film photography filtering its way through selfies, poetry, and music reviews. DeCristo was someone who I had shown to a friend or two, but each seemed to brush the artist off with slight disinterest, as if they didn’t entirely comprehend the beautiful intricacies behind their photography. However, whenever DeCristo’s work appeared on my feed, I found myself amazed and intrigued each time by what was presented in front of me.
As we introduced ourselves, the first thing I noticed about DeCristo is their tendency to always make eye contact. They would smile at you, nod at what you are saying, and were an active listener. They were easygoing, throwing in a joke here and there, allowing you to fully be present and comfortable with the conversation. By simply taking everything in, you could feel their energy radiating through.
“I'm pretty open as a person,” they said, as I explained how I run my interviews. “So there's not really much that you could ask me that I would be offended by. There's not really much [that’s] off the table. So don't worry too much about it!” Letting DeCristo take the lead after beginning with some introductory questions, the artist invited me into numerous dialogues about their life and identity, exploring parts of their childhood and their upbringing, all the way up to where they are now. Through the conversations and stories, it would seem as if you are catching up with a long-lost friend — finding a place within their narrative, one chapter at a time.
During my time interviewing DeCristo, I learned that they grew up in a small rural town of North Carolina, which did not have the resources available for a queer person. DeCristo moved through their community's school system with virtually the same group of people, needing to create resources for themselves as they grew older. “I was in a class of 36 people when I was in high school, and I grew up with the majority of those people,” they explained. “During this time, I was the only out queer person. But the thing is, I didn't get to come out. With 36 people in the grade, the news spread fast.” They soon found themselves providing the framework and foundations for other queer kids to navigate through these experiences within the years to come.
“After I'd been outed, I just felt incredibly angry,” they said. “I was beginning to realize how kind of alone I was. It kind of clicked [with] me that I could start laying the groundwork for these kids who came next. So, I tried to start a Gay Straight Alliance. I started with an interest form — sent that around the school. However, that just did not go well.
“There was one side of the student population that was fully against me. They started a petition to get … anyone [and anything] related to the gay community banned from the school. They were actively sending around paperwork to get me kicked out — literally for trying to make a resource for other queer people like myself. I bring this story up because not only did I not have the resources (especially when I tried to make them), but I was just fully shut down by my peers.”
Going through times of tribulation and emotional pain, DeCristo sought out ways to numb themself from those experiences. They began immersing themselves within pop culture and consumerism, becoming intrigued with the power in which consumption has over a capitalistic society. The more media they consumed, the more they began to realize the potential it held.
Being attracted to the notion that they could create media themselves, they took their anger and frustrations out within the form of photography. DeCristo took their father’s old Canon Rebel digital camera and began shooting the world around them. “Another thing about my upbringing is that it was rather boring,” DeCristo recounted. “We could look at cows, we could look at trees, and we could look at flowers. That was pretty much it.” But they soon also began to dabble in portrait photography, setting the stage for their current work.
“I have two incredible friends named Sadie and Cassidy who were like my original muses. We would pick up the camera, I would drive them to this pretty field nearby, and we would just style each other in these pretty outfits based on the TV shows we were watching, and just go from there,” they elaborated. “As I grew as a photographer and really started using Instagram, I started connecting with other women around my hometown or in surrounding cities. And that's where [it] all started to take shape.”
What made these first few photographs so important to DeCristo was how truly they acted as vessels in exploring their femininity — especially in a time that did not provide the resources to. They were allowed to express their style, fashion, and — most importantly — find a way to express their gender safely and securely. These photos were the foundation of realizing that there was more beyond the ordinary — and more beyond the binary.
“The original portraits were more [of] my femininity personified in a time where I couldn't not show it,” DeCristo said. “Or if I did, I would get reprimanded for it. But I knew that, by the time I was taking pictures, it was an opportunity for me to experiment with fashion, with feminine styles, [as well as] with the feminine experience, without...” They paused, taking a moment to truly think of what to say next before continuing, eyes drawing away from the camera. “You know, there's the camera between me and the experience.”
DeCristo continued to mention their experiences growing up without the current resources they have required, and how that affected them within their transition to New York. As their stories unraveled and found their way into the conversation, I began to see more of myself within them — we both gained most of our “queer” knowledge from the media, relying on shows like Glee to “teach” us what it meant to be gay or queer. We were taught how to love other people through the means of porn, because we didn’t have other queer people to set that example of what true love and relationships were like. Only when we finally had that chance to be who we felt we truly were did we see the honesty behind our reality — there was so much more to learn. For Michael Grace DeCristo, it was their time to gain a sense of self within the real world, away from the preconceived notions of what queerness and sexuality was like based off of the media.
“I've had to do a lot of unlearning and redefining my own identities and sense of self. And it's crazy! When I got to college, I was like, ‘That bitch is dead. It's done. He's dead!’ I went forward building this new life based on all I’d seen on TV. And even in college, it was super upsetting because I wasn't acknowledging all of the issues I had with my sexuality and my queerness and how little resources I had.
“So when I started to truly think things over during the pandemic, I just felt like the full picture started to all come together, especially with my trans experience. It allowed me to move forward in an authentic and real way, which didn’t happen when I just simply tried to forget my past self. With this space lockdown gave me, though, I feel like a whole new person again. But the difference between what I was like when I went to college and now is that I'm acknowledging that those other past lives are a part of me. It's all the same life, where I can build whatever I want.”
In acknowledging these parts of themselves, DeCristo was able to create a world that truly showcased the true nature of who they are as a person, and how they want to reflect that to those around them. Every released shoot and photo series became a tool and a new vessel to keep exploring the various parts of what makes them them. For example, in their series, Manmade, DeCristo navigates recreating a connection to men they have met within their childhood hometown and their early years within New York. Most importantly, it serves to create a landscape in which gender roles and norms ceased to exist, and those captured — along with DeCristo — can simply just be. Any traumas of the past could begin to be healed, through one photo at a time.
“There's a certain amount of escapism that goes into creating my work,” DeCristo said. “Because there's a certain amount of escapism that goes into shooting for me. When I'm shooting, I truly feel as if the personal experience — or any personal experience within my work — is the shoot. It is a space for me where I can simply take everything else and just put it away. I really feel the most present and alive when I'm shooting. And I want the end result to be something that people can look at and feel that for themselves.”
As it was, Michael Grace DeCristo has always stayed true to the person they are and their experiences in which they create, though the journey they have gone through to get to that point may have not been an easy one. But as someone who grew up on the outskirts of a small rural town in North Carolina, they sure have come a long way. To the untrained eye, DeCristo’s photography stands as a lush portfolio of dreamy, aesthetically-pleasing imagery. But to the sheltered, closeted queer person that I once was, they are a carrier and beaker of just how pleasing and invigorating life can be when you finally give yourself the chance to just be you. And don’t you see? That is a truly beautiful thing.
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