JJ Levine’s Alone Time 19, taken in 2021, appears to be a conventional portrait of a traditional nuclear family: mother, father, two children, all gathered in a living room. We know the little girl is a little girl because she’s in a floral dress and has a pink bow plonked on her head. The little boy wears blue jeans and a backwards baseball cap. Look closer, though, and you begin to see a resemblance between not just the kids but also their parents who (despite different hairstyles, clothes and poses) share the same features and build. In the series Alone Time, Montréal-based artist Levine creates images of couples – and in this case a couple and their kids – with one model playing both sides of the couple, upending the idea that gender is fixed.
“There’s a tension in all my work between reality and fiction,” says Levine, who produces carefully constructed photographic portraits of parents and children, lovers and friends. Even the works in his Queer Portraits series, which show real people from the queer and trans community, are carefully staged. The choice of setting and props can be about the sitter’s personality, as in grand historical portraits, or it can be about colour, pattern and composition. “What’s interesting,” he says, “is that someone might see this particular image and think it’s the most real of all the families I’ve photographed, even though it’s completely made up.”
