Jesse Pratt Lopez

Jesse Pratt López is an Atlanta-based photographer, activist and community organizer. She is also a proud Trans woman, Latina, and immigrant. She was born in Cali, Colombia and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada. López uses her artwork and platform to visibilize queer and trans folks, people of color, undocumented folks, HIV+ folks, and others from communities that are criminalized and erased. Her work focuses on many aspects of the queer & trans experience; she has organized with SFQP and curated an a five part show which included an exhibition aiming at destigmatizing and highlighting sex work as not only work, but as an artform. She is also the founder of the Trans Housing Coalition , a project that began as a photography-based crowdfunding campaign, aimed at alleviating chronic homelessness in the TGNC (Trans & Gender Non-Conforming) community in Atlanta.
Although she has worked primarily as a documentarian and photojournalist, mostly documenting immigrant communities in the deep South, López’s personal work ranges from experimental digital photographs visualizing the experience of gender dysphoria and the fetishization of trans bodies, to introspective large format 4x5 film introspective self portraits, completely obscuring gender in their creation. She prefers to document those communities which she has a personal connection with most: many of her longer and most successful projects, such as “Unlikely Undocumented ” or “The Hoe Stroll on Piedmont,” intimately capture the lives of queer and trans folks whom she calls her chosen family; for many queer and trans folks, chosen family is all they have. Many of her personal stories dissect gender and the performative role it plays in our society. She believes that identity informs everything in society and that it is almost impossible to separate the art from the artist. Ultimately, she hopes to make photography a more accessible medium. López has been published in both print magazines (Wussy Mag, local) and national publications, such as: Atlantic Magazine , The Hechinger Report , The Guardian , and PBS NewsHour. She also has exhibited work in places such as the Center for Civil and Human Rights and Mason Fine Art in Atlanta. Pre-pandemic, you could find her at your local under-ground queer dance party, documenting the marginalized bodies dancing to a rhythm of resistance, while she twirled on the dancefloor herself.