In April, Milo Mosquera led the photographer Camila Falquez and her team through the woods near Cali, Colombia, where he lives. By a bend in the Pance River he removed his shirt and walked into the water, Falquez wading close behind. Shoulder-deep, he turned to meet her lens.
In the resulting portrait, Mosquera appears like a carefully sculpted bust with a piece of red silk fastened on his head; his expression is not quite sad, but enigmatic, dignified, almost defiant—though a viewer may wonder whether the twin droplets on his cheeks are tears. “They’re water from the river,” Falquez told me. She was pleased with the arresting quality of the shot. A portrait, she believes, should stop viewers in their tracks, leaving them with questions the image cannot answer. Who is this person? What is their life like?
Milo Mosquera Rodriguez, he/him, Mosquera, Nariño.
Mosquera is one of seventy trans and nonbinary people Falquez photographed for “Compañerx,” a collection of portraits that accompany a legislative proposal to enshrine the rights of genderqueer people in Colombia. In recent years, a coalition of activists and organizations, including the Liga de Salud Trans, has been locating and surveying trans people in every region of the country to get a sense of their struggles and aspirations. When Falquez contacted the Liga about a possible collaboration, in 2022, she learned that the coalition was planning to draw on the survey to draft a bill for Colombia’s legislature which would, among other things, facilitate a process for modifying one’s name and gender on government documents, attempt to combat bias in the health-care sector, and grant preferential housing loans to “vulnerable people of diverse gender identities.” Falquez thought perhaps she could photograph some of the survey participants, whose lives it stood to affect.
