I AM LOCAL IN LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO & NEW YORK
I AM LOCAL IN LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO & NEW YORK
Chloe Aftel (she/they) is a non-binary director and photographer based in California. For over a decade Chloe has documented minority groups with a focus on female-identified, non-binary and trans communities, most notably in her award-winning book Outside & In Between that explores life beyond the gender binary.
Working in both motion & stills, across portraiture, reportage, personal projects, and advertising, Chloe illuminates the roles of gender, identity and sexuality including inhabiting a body that is treated as other. Giving subjects room to move in a cinematic landscape, she is focused on catching the moments in between, when people forget the camera is there and allow more of their true selves to be seen.
Chloe has photographed victims of sexual violence, reported on Covid’s impact on the trans community, and gained access as the first reporter in the Covid wards of the West coast’s hardest hit hospitals. She has covered underground abortion providers, the impact of gender pronouns on daily life, and clergy abuse. She has shot for The New York Times, Mother Jones, Playboy, Dazed & Confused, Vogue Germany, The Hollywood Reporter, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue Italia, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue & more.
She has brought her unique visual point of view to bear on lifestyle advertising campaigns for Apple, T-Mobile, Levi’s, MasterCard, Google and many others.
AWARDS, PRESS & MUSEUMS
Chloe has won awards from Critical Mass, American Photo, PDN 30, International Photography Awards, and LensCulture and has been a featured artist in Vice, Buzzfeed, The Observer, Refinery29, Mother Jones, Slate and others. She has shown at RAC, Mopla, Annenberg Space for Photography, Big LA Portrait Gallery, Girlgaze and New Visionaries and her work hangs in the permanent collections Oakland Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art and Denver Art Museum.