Norbury, Rosamund
Item
name
Norbury, Rosamund
firstName
Rosamund
lastName
Norbury
Biography
"The daughter of a British photographer and a model, Norbury was born in India and immigrated to British Columbia as a small child. She came out of the closet in 1969, the year of the Stonewall Riots and the same year that the federal government decriminalized homosexuality."
"She began her career doing fashion shoots for hip Cordova Street clothing stores in the 70s before spending an extended period following rodeo cowboys on the circuit for her first book, Behind the Chutes. It was the carefully constructed masculinity of those cowboys with their tight jeans and giant belt buckles that first got her thinking about the construction of gender."
"Her second book Guy to Goddess began when she started photographing drag queens around Vancouver in the late 1980s. Over time she moved deeper into the community, gaining access behind the scenes to photograph the hours of hard work that went into creating the larger than life personas.
Article content
In the early 2000s, her open-mindedness was put to the test when she worked as a still photographer on the TV series Kink, which took a very frank look at the private lives of people at the fringes of human sexuality.
“Some of the worst times were in Montreal or Toronto in August,” she recalls. “I’m crouched down in a corner taking pictures in some scene in a dungeon or something and I get a big hot flash in the middle of it.”
Somewhere along the way Norbury realized that she had another persona inside her and began the process of bringing him out with the help of her friend Dianne Holme, a professional hair designer who has worked with George Clooney.
Holme painstakingly created a beard, moustache and side burns that matched Norbury’s curly red hair and her alter ego Rod Bush was born."
"She began her career doing fashion shoots for hip Cordova Street clothing stores in the 70s before spending an extended period following rodeo cowboys on the circuit for her first book, Behind the Chutes. It was the carefully constructed masculinity of those cowboys with their tight jeans and giant belt buckles that first got her thinking about the construction of gender."
"Her second book Guy to Goddess began when she started photographing drag queens around Vancouver in the late 1980s. Over time she moved deeper into the community, gaining access behind the scenes to photograph the hours of hard work that went into creating the larger than life personas.
Article content
In the early 2000s, her open-mindedness was put to the test when she worked as a still photographer on the TV series Kink, which took a very frank look at the private lives of people at the fringes of human sexuality.
“Some of the worst times were in Montreal or Toronto in August,” she recalls. “I’m crouched down in a corner taking pictures in some scene in a dungeon or something and I get a big hot flash in the middle of it.”
Somewhere along the way Norbury realized that she had another persona inside her and began the process of bringing him out with the help of her friend Dianne Holme, a professional hair designer who has worked with George Clooney.
Holme painstakingly created a beard, moustache and side burns that matched Norbury’s curly red hair and her alter ego Rod Bush was born."
Studio Location
Vancouver, British Columbia
Education
West Vancouver Secondary School
Vancouver School of Art
Vancouver School of Art
Title
Norbury, Rosamund