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Heroes. By Karoliina Paatos.
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Photographs by Karoliina Paatos
The Angry Bat, 2021. In English. Unpaged, 8¼x10¼".
I first came to know Karoliina Paatos’ through her 2016 work American Cowboy. This series comfortably sits within the contemporary Western zeitgeist, next to Lucas Foglia’s Frontcountry, Ronan Guillou’s Country Limit, and Tim Richmond’s Last Best Hiding Place. In a critical appraisal, what these works do is extend long sedimented ideals of the West — those overplayed tropes of dusty cowboys and wide horizons. This is not a critique, simply an expression of what they are and why they are beautiful.
Paatos’ American Cowboy falls into the Hollywood and dime-novel inspired idea of the West. Heroes, however, avoids replicating aged ideas of the West in favour of a more nuanced expansion. The wide horizons are the same, but Paatos adds a new charater — the gay cowboy performing on his stage. The rodeo.
Heroes differs from all the aforementioned photobooks not only in focus but in form. The work is a unique collection of printed matter encased in a box set reminiscent of Old Glory. Breaking the box’s seal, we find four colour-coded and numbered booklets, a 43-page newsprint, and two 5-print accordion booklets. The newsprint provides context and a community voice through the stories of Chuck and Phil & Drew, while the foldouts act as visual bonuses, and the four booklets do the heavy lifting.
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Booklet one opens with the line “It’s been an incredible journey” and goes on to illustrate a sense of movement and scene-setting not found in American Cowboy. This booklet provides an assemblage of images to introduce the rodeos and their cowboys that are to come. They also suggest that searching out the American cowboy requires work, while searching out LGBTQ cowboys requires additional attentiveness.
Booklet three goes on to document the events and the reciprocating community that is informally constructed around the idea of competition. There is a level of performance in this chapter that builds towards the final book, operating as preparation for the work’s pictorial and existential crescendo. It is in the fourth booklet that we see the Goffmanesque performativity of a genuine self depicted.
Cowboy culture and the Western are spaces of ritualistic and coded performativity and an essential element to understanding classic Americana. What Paatos documents is a group’s simultaneous adoption and expulsion of that understanding in favour of a fresh narrative. A narrative that provides a unique cross between pageantry, ‘shit kickers’, stirrups and rainbow flags. What this narrative allows for is a space, an arena, where people can be whole, where they can be loved, a space where individuals can simply be themselves.
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The concept of the Gay Rodeo is in no way a perceptive oxymoron. The idea of a gay rodeo fits square within the world of brotherly camaraderie of responsible and mindful masculinity. Paatos shows us a subculture that challenges the idea of hyper-masculinity, a world where atypical cowboys and gender-diverse riders can share the spotlight. The project also hits on the complexity of community and place, illustrating that not every cowboy is a straight, dart smoking, whisky drinking man-of-men.
There is an archetype of course, but the fun in any archetype is proving them wrong. To that end, Heroes helps to disrupt gender and sexual normativity and it minimizes the fantastical nature of the ‘hero’ macho straight cowboy. It also offers a challenge to the heteronormativity found within rural culture in favour of one that is more layered and nuanced.
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