He Was My Son…My Daughter,
Jana Birchum created a photo essay in tribute to the life of Donald Scott Fuller, an transgendered 18-year-old from Austin, Texas who was brutally murdered in 1999. To accompany the photographs, Jordan Smith wrote, “For some reason, not much has ever been made of it [Fuller’s murder]… How could it come to pass that a teenage boy would be brutally murdered… and no one would even ask why? The answer, though neither polite nor ‘politically correct,’ seems simple enough: By living his life openly as a transsexual woman, Fuller lived outside the parameters of what most of society considers acceptable.” The images Birchum captured on film of Austin nightlife in Foto8, a quarterly photojournalism webzine, leave the viewer with a sense of mystery and sorrow.