Jeff Sheng, a current Ph.D. student in the sociology department, led a discussion this past Tuesday on his newly published book, “Fearless: Portraits of LGBQT Students.” Featuring over 200 LGBQT students, “Fearless” is a photography project that aims to promote social change.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): What first made you interested in student photography?

Jeff Sheng (JS): I did it as a hobby first and I went to Harvard as an undergrad where they have a really great visual studies program. The photography and film department there really emphasized documentary work and I was really lucky to have advisers who really liked the idea of documentary photos to explore society injustice topics.

I just thought it was a really interesting way to use my creativity, with something that was also academic. It was a really a hobby that I never thought I would major in but I took a few classes and before I knew it, I was a photo major.

TSD: What inspired you to focus on LGBQT athletes?

JS: The project is a very personal project — I played tennis most of life, since I was 6 or 7 years old. I played varsity in high school and actually decided to quit playing right before college, mostly because of my own identity as someone as part of the LGBQT community, I decided athletics wasn’t a very accommodating place for people who identified as [LGBQT]. Basically, I thought [about] doing a photo series that explored that idea. [I’m] also photographing people who were able to come out as high school or collegiate athletes, which is still pretty rare. If you go to a lot of schools, especially at the elite Division I levels, there are very few athletes that do come out.

TSD: How did you choose the athletes you worked with and what was that process like?

JS: A lot of them found out about the project through word of mouth. I’ve done about 40 to 50 exhibitions at different colleges and high schools already over the last couple years so often times when I visit a school or area, the athletes find out about the project and volunteer.

There’s no audition process or anything like that; I just try to make my schedule work with theirs. Sometimes photoshoots are able to happen, sometimes not.

We also sometimes have have a hard time finding an open time at the gym or where they work out at to do a shoot because I prefer when there’s not a lot of people there so there’s a privacy to the photoshoot. There are also some Stanford athletes [in the project].

TSD: Does the project involve more than just photography?

JS: I actually did a lot of informal interviews with the athletes about their experiences. When I came around to putting together the book project, that idea started about three years ago and people suggested to turn it into a book but part of the problem about doing photo books is that they’re really expensive and mainstream publishers are often really worried about photo books making money. I was in a lot of different talks with photo book publishers and nothing was really happening with the mainstream publishers because they wanted me to focus on famous celebrity athletes who were really well-known and [they] kind of overlooked the idea of celebrating the accomplishments of these college athletes who’ve done a lot, I think, by coming out to their sports teams, especially in an environment that is often times homophobic or transphobic.

In 2012, I started a Kickstarter drive and over 60 days we raised $55,000, which provided a really good amount of the deposit for an independent publisher to take on the job. So for the last couple years, while I’ve been at graduate school here, I’ve been working on this book on the side with the publishers in New York and finally this summer, we were able to publish it. I had a book opening at Nike Headquarters, one of the big sponsors of the book.

TSD: What are some of the other projects you have worked on?

JS: One of my other big projects is on the “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy in the military, the policy that prohibited service members in the military to come out as [LGBQT]. Between 2009 and 2011, I photographed about 80 service members without their faces showing because they couldn’t reveal who they were or they would be kicked out of the military. That project got a lot of media attention; it was in the New York Times, ABC News…they all published photos from that series and interviewed me about it.

I came to Stanford to work on expanding that project as a dissertation for my Ph.D. in sociology, so I’m kind of going back to a lot of those service members and re-photographing with them with their faces showing and also interviewing them and writing about the integration between of sexual orientation and gender identity policies in the United States military.

TSD: How do you think your book has been received by college students across America?

JS: It’s been really good…I think a lot of people don’t expect that the book is a really personal project. I wrote a lot about my own experience coming out and five other athletes talk about their experiences. One of them talks about their experience attempting suicide. It’s a very emotional book and people don’t really expect that…they think it’s a beautiful coffee-table book but it goes much deeper than that and I’m very happy to have done a project like that.

TSD: How has your time here at Stanford shaped your work?

JS: It’s my fourth year here at Stanford and I love it here. I play on the club tennis team here and it’s cool to be back on a sports team. The sociology department has been super supportive. I’m currently a Stanford interdisciplinary student graduate fellow and that fellowship provides me with an incredible funding package for three more years here. It’s basically time for me to just do my work and research and devote a lot of my time and attention to my projects that are both creative and academic at the same time.

Contact Arielle Rodriguez at arielle3 ‘at’ stanford.edu.