Polecat Peepshow

Shamu Azizam

“Photography is how I speak when survival has made me quiet. I document myself in states of seduction and solitude. There’s a tension I live in—the desire to be beautiful in a world that demands a very specific kind of man, and the refusal to erase my queerness just to be legible. I use the camera to hold that tension without resolving it.”

“I draw on the horror and eroticism embedded in American identity—the myths we inherit, the roles we perform, and the versions of ourselves we’re asked to become. I’m not interested in patriotism so much as the rot beneath it. The cowboy myth. The soldier. The working man. I wear them like costumes until they fall apart.”

“Sex work is part of my reality, and part of my lens. There’s power in that gaze—transactional, erotic, confrontational. These images are about what we sell, what we give, what we lose. The body becomes currency, but it’s also a site of resistance. It’s not just about sex. It’s about who gets to be wanted, and why.”

“Nature appears throughout my work not as an escape, but as a co-conspirator. Rural landscapes carry their own intimacy—lonely, raw, almost violent in how honestly they reflect you back. In those spaces, I find the truth of my solitude. It becomes a wishing well where I deposit versions of myself I’m not ready to bury.”