Psychoanalysis tells us that the unconscious knows no time. There is no distinction between the past, the present, or the future in it. It is a veritable blank slate in the truest sense, inscribed only by experience and uncatalogued by the restless vagaries of time. Conversely, the body, in all its interiority and exteriority, is the slate of time par excellence. The American writer Don DeLillo once wrote: “Time binds itself to aging flesh.” The body is a clock, ticking ever so turgidly toward a destiny whose only promise appears to be decay and death.

What then, to make of the queer body within such a time that appears only to progress toward this body’s inevitable finitude? Queer time means a time that is anything but linear, outside of any normative sense of time which is often delimited by reproductive heterosexuality. There are many ways to queer time. The history of AIDS, for instance, queered the time of sex and sexuality for queer-identified men by reconstituting how we came to perceive our bodies against a backdrop of unaccountable loss. There are still other ways, as Nicholas Aiden seems to suggest, to queer time.

Here you find the body fragmented and held at a standstill. In today’s app-saturated culture, where the question of beauty is answered through a body presented as a unified whole, Aiden presents an alternate vision of the body and its beauty. Presented in parts, its surface is treated like a textured landscape, its nooks and crannies presented as placeholders of and for intimate memory. One might argue that photography as a medium is itself queer. French philosopher Jacques Derrida suggested about photography, that “[it] not only ‘gives to be seen’ what exists, photography invents.” In a sense, here, Aiden invents a new language for beauty itself.

* PHOTO OF NICHOLAS AIDEN: Nicholas Aiden