There’s a film of an interview between James Lawler and Casey Orr upstairs at Open Eye Gallery, that is very worth watching, in the context of the exhibition and the longer project, but also for artists and arts producers. The question is framed around gender identity, specifically around gender-neutral pronouns.
James asks Casey about the title change (because Saturday Town used to be called Saturday Girl), and Casey answers by explaining that somewhere around the pandemic, and quite suddenly, gender identity became a huge cultural question mark, because young people were not feeling represented by traditional gender roles, or the ways they were expressed.
At that point, Saturday Girl, as a title, and a project, stopped being able to reflect the fashion and identity of the people it had sought to represent for the last ten years.
Boys were asking to be photographed, and their clothes were more strikingly expressive than before. And participants who didn’t feel comfortable with girl or boy labels could have felt discluded. So Casey Orr, the photographer behind the project, made the decision to change the title and present personal expression beyond gender.
This is important on a few levels. One, because it opened up an important project (that has tracked youth identity across the North of England since 2013) to everybody, and two, because it marks a moment in cultural history, where questioning gender identity became not just accepted, but almost normal.
Obviously, there are cultural divides on the issue, and being trans in Britain is in no way easy, and certainly doesn’t come without discrimination, fear, hate, or bigoted abuse. But it is an important piece of the cultural conversation, and by removing gender from the project, Casey Orr has made gender accessibility a core success of it. So the young people being photographed are not under any label. They are themselves.
It’s been a while since I’ve done town on a Saturday. Pub on a Wednesday is about as far as I can stretch. But back then, clothes were intensely expressive. Even for those of us who wore cords and plain docs with plaid shirts. There was a set identity in that. For those who expressed themselves through teenage piercings, tattoos and adapted fashion, there wasn’t much else more crucial.
Saturday Town, in 2024, has shifted from its former titles, and the trappings of them, and is now a clear representation of how we as a culture externalise our sense of self.
Every portrait in the gallery is one person more who was validated, and whose outfit is immortalised as art. And no, I don’t personally believe that most outfits are art. They’re outfits. But some are. Some are such potently intentional expressions of self-identity that they can’t not be seen as art.
And Casey Orr knows that. Elsewhere in her interview with James Lawler, they talk about otherness – framed around Casey’s otherness as an American living in Britain. And that, paired with her own strength of style clearly does make the subjects of each image more comfortable to engage and be part of it.
And now, we get to stand in a room, packed with small-c-culture, and let it wash over us in a way real life rarely does. Because Saturday Town is an expression of now. Get used to it.
Casey Orr: Saturday Town is open at Open Eye Gallery until 18th May 2024
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith