Terra Rosa...
Tucked away in the northeast corner of the Spanish coastal hills awaits an experience of global queerness, wellness, retreat, and creative residency. May 2026
There is something beautiful about not arriving with a fully formed thesis. Especially in a place like Terra Rosa, which already seems to resist rigid definition. What I know, at least right now, is less about the images themselves and more about the conditions I hope to enter: slowness, listening, queerness, ritual, intimacy, softness, discomfort, openness. A willingness to be changed by proximity.In June, I will travel to the northeast hills of coastal Spain for a creative residency at Terra Rosa, joining an international queer community gathered around wellness, embodiment, artistic practice, and what they call “Queer Ashram.” I hesitate to define too clearly what the work will become before I arrive. In my experience, the strongest images emerge through relationship with a place and the people inhabiting it. They reveal themselves slowly. They ask to be listened to.
Lately, my creative practice has been orbiting intimacy. Not only romantic or erotic intimacy, though queerness inevitably carries those frequencies too, but the quieter forms of closeness that exist beneath performance. The space between breaths. The subtle shift in someone’s body when they begin to feel safe. The emotional atmosphere of communal living. The ways queer people soften, open, retreat, perform, conceal, reveal, and belong.
I imagine the work may become a blend of documentary observation, environmental portraiture, visual journaling, and something more atmospheric or difficult to name. Bodies in landscape. Shared meals. Morning light through linen. Sweat. Silence. Exhaustion. Play. Spirituality. Loneliness inside togetherness. The strange and beautiful contradictions that emerge whenever humans attempt to live closely and honestly with one another.
There is also something compelling to me about the idea of queer pilgrimage. Traveling across the world not simply to make photographs, but to enter a temporary condition of attention. To step outside the familiar rhythms of productivity and identity and into something more porous. More receptive. More uncertain.
What ultimately emerges from this residency will undoubtedly be shaped by the people I meet, the energy of the place, and the unfolding rhythm of the experience itself. For now, this page serves less as a declaration and more as a marker on the path. A note written before arrival. A quiet anticipation of becoming.
<3 liam
June 2026
Terra Rosa... after
Before I left for Spain, I wrote that I didn't want to arrive with a fully formed thesis. I wanted to listen.
To the place.
To the people.
To the story asking to be told.
I thought I was talking about photography.
I wasn't.
Or at least, not entirely.
One of the quiet decisions I made before arriving was not to tell people that I’m a coach. I wanted to arrive simply as another human being. Another queer person. Another artist. I wanted to know what it felt like to meet people without the subtle gravitational pull that our professions can create.
There was something deeply liberating about that. For nearly three weeks, I wasn't facilitating anyone else's growth. I wasn't holding space on the clock. I wasn't listening for someone else's breakthrough.
I was simply being.
And then something unexpected happened. The very thing I have spent years trying to cultivate for other people quietly emerged around me. A community where I felt seen.
Not because of what I do.
Not because of what I know.
Not because of how useful I could be.
Simply because I was there.
Lately I've been describing my work across mediums as cultivating environments where people can feel seen, so that in-turn they can better see themselves. Terra Rosa became that environment for me.
It is strangely humbling to discover your life's work by becoming a participant in it instead of its architect.
Somewhere between the shared meals, the late-night conversations, the rituals, the laughter, the tears, the stillness, and the hundreds of quiet moments in between, something settled inside me. Not certainty. Something better.
Trust.
A deeper trust in the person I already am.
A clearer understanding of the strange, beautiful unicorn I've spent so much of my life trying to explain—or worse, trying to edit into something more understandable.
I don't think Terra Rosa changed me. I think it removed enough noise for me to hear myself again.
Ironically, that realization now changes the way I look at every photograph I made there.
When I first arrived, I thought I was documenting a community.
Now I think I was witnessing what becomes possible when people are given permission to become more fully themselves.
Perhaps that's all any of us are really looking for.
Someone to see us clearly enough that we begin to recognize ourselves.
July 2026: The Work.
The question I carried with me throughout my residency was surprisingly simple:
What does it feel like to be here?
Not, What happened here?
Not, How do I document this place?
But something more elusive.
How do you develop a visual language that can describe an experience?
As the days unfolded, I found myself less interested in creating a traditional documentary than in making photographs that carried the emotional texture of the place itself. Documentary photography often asks us to observe. Lifestyle photography often asks us to imagine ourselves there. Neither quite described what I found myself making.
Instead, the photographs became invitations to remember.
They move between portraiture and observation. Between celebration and contemplation. Between spectacle and stillness.
There are portraits made in quiet light, where each face is offered the same frame and the same invitation to simply exist.
There are images of loud, exuberant queer joy. Pride. Dancing. Sweat. Glitter. Bare skin. Celebration without apology.
There are photographs of quiet mornings, afternoon naps, shared meals, wandering conversations, and the gentle work of simply being together.
There are glimpses into Queer Ashram, where vulnerability became practice and community became a kind of mirror.
Some images feel almost documentary.
Others feel romantic.
Perhaps they are both.
Because memory itself is rarely objective.
When I look back on Terra Rosa, I don't remember events in chronological order. I remember feelings. Light through linen. Someone laughing across a dinner table (Almost certainly Ronen). The weight of another person's hand resting on my shoulder. Silence after tears. A room full of people singing together.
That is the language I was trying to learn.
Not how Terra Rosa looked.
But how it felt to belong there.
As I begin organizing this body of work, I'm realizing these photographs resist tidy categories. Portraits spill into documentary. Community dissolves into landscape. Celebration gives way to solitude. Intimacy appears everywhere, though never quite in the same form twice.
Perhaps that's fitting.
After all, what happened here cannot really be divided into galleries.
It was one experience.
One long conversation.
One collective becoming.
And these photographs are simply different ways of listening to it.
July 2026:
I don't think this body of work is actually about Terra Rosa.
I think it's about what humans look like when they experience belonging.
Terra Rosa is simply the place where I encountered that question most vividly.
So... what becomes possible when we are truly seen?
The Faces of Terra Rosa
Before I arrived, I imagined making portraits.
I didn't imagine making these portraits.
Over the years, I've photographed thousands of people. Most portrait sessions begin the same way. A little conversation. A little nervousness. A gradual softening. We spend the first many frames learning how to be with one another before we finally arrive at something that starts to feel honest.
Terra Rosa was different.
Almost without exception, people stepped in front of my camera already there.
There was very little performance.
Very little self-consciousness.
Very little of the quiet negotiation that so often happens between a person and a camera.
Instead, they simply arrived.
We would pause for a moment. Breathe. Meet each other's eyes.
Then I'd point to the lens and quietly say, "I'm right in here."
Usually I made one photograph. Occasionally two.
Rarely more.
Not because I was trying to work quickly.
Because there wasn't anywhere else to go.
The photograph had already happened.
As I watched these faces accumulate over the weeks, I began to understand that this wasn't really a portrait project.
It was a portrait of a community.
Or perhaps more accurately, a portrait of what becomes possible when a community creates enough safety that people no longer feel the need to perform themselves. Each face is unmistakably individual. Each carries its own history.
Its own grief.
Its own joy.
Its own becoming.
And yet together they begin to read like something else entirely.
A chorus.
Not a collection of portraits, but many voices speaking the same quiet truth.
When I animate these faces together, each appearing for only a fraction of a second, something unexpected happens. Individual identity begins to dissolve into collective presence. One person becomes another becomes another becomes another, until the boundaries between us soften.
The project no longer asks, "Who is this person?" It begins asking,
"What does humanity look like when it remembers itself?"
I don't think these are the best portraits I've ever made because of anything I did.
I think they may be the most honest portraits I've ever made because, for a brief moment in time, people had remembered that they didn't need to become someone else before they were worthy of being seen.
And perhaps that's what Terra Rosa gave all of us.
Not permission to change.
Permission to stop long enough to discover that who we already were was enough.
Listening
Before I arrived at Terra Rosa, I wrote that my intention was to listen.
To the place.
To the people.
To the story asking to be told.
For a while, I thought the story was Terra Rosa.
Then I thought it was intimacy.
Then queer community.
Now I think those were all chapters.
The story was simpler than that.
What becomes possible when a person is truly seen?
For years, I've described my life's work as cultivating environments where people feel seen, so they can better see themselves.
Terra Rosa became the first place where I experienced that work from the other side.
It turns out that being seen doesn't change us.
It reminds us who we already are.
The Evidence of Belonging
There is a long history of photographing queer pain.
There is a long history of photographing queer protest.
Thankfully, there is also a growing history of photographing queer joy.
But as I began editing this body of work, I realized these photographs weren't actually about joy.
Joy is simply what became visible.
The real subject is belonging.
A Note About the Gallery
Because many of these photographs depict intimate, vulnerable, and unclothed moments, the gallery is currently password protected while I work directly with those pictured to obtain their permission for public display.Consent is central to this project. Just as the photographs were created through trust and relationship, I want their continued sharing to reflect that same care. As participants grant permission, this work will gradually become available for public viewing.
Evidence of Belonging
©WILLIAMCLICKENGER2026