Published in April 2018 by Gnomic Book, You Are Masters Of The Fish And Birds And All The Animals (YAMOTFABAATA) is a book consisting of a series of color portraits and landscapes principally made in Virginia, United States, which cumulatively reckon with the position and ascendant power of white heteronormative masculinity.

White American Masculinity is an identity that I and others are both scarred by and exceptionally privileged to enjoy – and thus responsible to address. My internal contradictions are a microcosm of my nation’s: a psychic structure undergirding American White Supremacy. Founding fathers such as Patrick Henry ("Liberty or Death!") are memorialized in myriad, public ways, while their anonymous slaves died liberty-less. On one front, United States colonialists fought a war for independence while on the other we did so to deprive Native Americans of theirs. And now, we continue to elect leaders who perpetuate the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and xenophobic language that traces a history of profound othering, subjugation, injustice, and systemic inequality.

I don't know how to say it's scary to be a white man in the United States of America, because it’s scarier to be a woman or a minority. I am he whom I fight against. This project – a portrait of a psyche – is the language I’ve thus far conceived.

Postscript: Since this article was written in 2018, is there anything about the current state of affairs in the US that you would like to comment on in your series? How do you see the current shift in the political landscape influencing this series? How would you develop it further?

Shane Rocheleau: I don’t intend to expand or develop YAMOTFABAATA) specifically. It is a complete project. But, in so many ways, it is an extension of older work: The Reflection in the Pool (2011-2014; Gnomic Book, 2019) and A Glorious Victory (2012-ongoing). In turn, my newest completed work — Lakeside (2016-2021; Gnomic Book, 2022) — is an extension of YAMOTFABAATA. Further, the work I’m presently making is, itself, a development on and continuation of each of these previous projects.

As you know, present events and conditions always reframe the past. My intention with each of my completed projects remains the same, of course, frozen in a discreet past. But I certainly look back on YAMOTFABAATA and think new thoughts, have new feelings. I’m more scared now; the United States is yet more fractured, wrought by a growing Christian Nationalism (patriarchal and white supremacist), and bent toward Civil War. Perhaps I’m histrionic, but I can at least say this: post-Capital Riot, the U.S. — not to mention the world — has shifted yet further away, in the aggregate, from inclusiveness, popular economic security, and liberty, and nearer to tribalism, corporate rule, and fascism. In hindsight, YAMOTFABAATA’s foreboding mood now feels inevitable. More desperately now than ever, we need to replace demonization with empathy and the propaganda of American Exceptionalism with a historically honest reckoning; we need to understand each other as equals, subjects filled with complicated, tragic, and joyful life experiences, possessed of narrative and creativity, consciousness and desire. Objectification and ahistoricism yield righteousness—never dialogue, paranoia—never community, and violence—never peace. Lakeside directly explores this; it is a development of and response to YAMOTFABAATA.

*Federal Reserve Building, Richmond, VA*

PS: You present an unflinching glimpse at the destruction men have caused on the environment and how in shaping our manufactured world, they’ve created a warped imprint on the natural. What role does location and landscape play in your work?

Rocheleau: I tend to make work that responds to my most immediate surroundings. In 2011, I moved to a Southside apartment in the old industrial center of Southside Richmond, VA. There, I found the homeless population profoundly visible and in ways I hadn’t ever experienced. In response, I made work about the homeless persons who lived within a few hundred meters of me (The Reflection in the Pool). A Glorious Victory explores the relationship between history, power, and freedom as it is evidenced in the people and landscape of Petersburg, Virginia, a 20 minute drive from where I lived when I began. YAMOTFABAATA is rooted in the history and politics of the Confederacy, of which Richmond was the Capital (even if the result is less direct about this connection). Most recently, I made Lakeside almost entirely within my small, one-square-mile neighborhood. Finally, all of my work arises out of my deep interest in the human condition, and this interest ultimately follows my abiding curiosity about the nature of myself and my humanity.

I am endlessly fascinated by what I see, think, and feel on any given day. The most immediately proximal tends to most immediately inspire me — myself, primarily, followed by my neighborhood, my region, my country, then the world. What I’m saying is this: location and landscape are absolutely integral to the shape of each of my projects. The closer to myself and the very specific ideas and topography that touch me, the closer I get to the source of my present work.

Shane Rocheleau (MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University) is an American photographer whose work confronts the endemic position of toxic masculinity and white supremacy within the American experience. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Spain, Russia, Brazil, Australia, Ukraine, The United Kingdom, India, and Germany, and his photographs have been featured in a wide variety of online and print publications, including Aperture’s The PhotoBook Review, Dear Dave Magazine, The Heavy Collective, Paper Journal, and The Washington Post. Rocheleau’s three monographs – You Are Masters Of The Fish And Birds And All The Animals (2018), The Reflection In The Pool (2019), and Lakeside (2022) – are published by Gnomic Book and variously collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Vogue Italia Collection, Fondazione Teatro Regio di Parma, and Tate Britain, amongst others. Rocheleau currently lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

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