Charting the emotional ride of friend and muse Bailey’s transition, Nick Haymes’ expressive new book is testament to the power of letting someone come into focus on their own terms
Connection, for photographer Nick Haymes, is a long game, requiring presence, patience, and resistance to the quick grab of an image. “I like to use it as a language,” he explains, “rather than a single shot as a punctuation mark.” His latest book, Dancing on the Fault Line, traces this philosophy across 14 years of photographs made in collaboration with Bailey, a magnetic and uncompromising subject who became both muse and friend. What unfolds through the photographs, which are anchored by a raw essay by Bailey herself, is not a traditional portrait, but an unscripted choreography of a life lived – and the quiet devotion it takes to let someone come into focus on their own terms.
Haymes first encountered Bailey on Facebook in the mid-2000s, at a time when he was stepping back from editorial photography. “She reached out to meet on Facebook and I thought, ‘You’re an interesting character,’” he reflects. “She had a photo of her in a tutu in front of a bunch of jocks at her high school prom that she got kicked out of.” Bailey invited him into her world – her life in Los Angeles, her farm in conservative Temecula (a sanctuary she founded where queer and trans people could gather and express freely), her friendships – which would eventually become the ground from which the book emerged.
Over the 14 years the photographs were made, their own relationship naturally unfolded into a unique way of working together that was immersive rather than extractive. “I don’t like to go in and take a photo and move out,” Haymes says. “I find that a little bit touristic.” His approach favoured proximity and ease over production. “Some weekends, I’d go wanting to take a picture at sunrise, but then we’d just end up sitting, talking all weekend and I wouldn’t take a single photo.”
During this time, Haymes also watched Bailey shift and resurface – sometimes vanishing for months, sometimes drawing him back in. “You sort of measure time when you can flip through the book and see a little 17-year-old twink and then a 30-something-year-old woman,” he laughs. The title of the book – Dancing on the Fault Line – speaks to that sense of instability, both emotional and geographical. “The life that Bailey lives is sort of always teetering on something being cataclysmic or disruptive at some point,” he reflects.
Haymes’ images beautifully hold this fractured arc without forcing it into narrative; instead, they gather the texture of a life, wildly different to his own, unfolding in motion. Moving between black-and-white and colour, the photographs oscillate between moments of furious expression and throbbing intimacy, charting not only Bailey’s transition, but the emotional terrain and support networks that carried her through it.
This, perhaps, is what lies at the heart of Haymes’ work: a persistent belief in our potential for kindness. “I love people,” he says. “You can be burned by them all the time … but in general, I’m forever an optimist.” His faith is what allows the photographs – often of revelry, vulnerability, and the heat of unbridled bodies – to hold such emotional proximity without ever tipping into voyeurism. “You have to be in love with whoever you’re photographing at some point,” he muses.
Looking back through the book, Haymes sees his own growth mirrored in the photographs. “Hopefully I’ve matured in how I see and edit,” he reflects. “Some of the images I’d take now, others I only could have made in my thirties.” Editing the book meant returning to thousands of negatives, images he’d often left untouched for years, and confronting his earlier instincts. But when Covid forced a pause in shooting, he began to sense that the project, long open-ended, might finally be complete. “It felt right,” he says. “I was ready.”
Dancing on the Fault Line by Nick Haymes is published by Kodoji Press, and is out now.
