Tynan Byrne’s how strange others’ hands on the body that you lovetransforms personal history into an exploration of queer identity, care, and the lives that continue beyond survival.
“You never know why people are standing together in a crowded room.” That’s the first sentence I wrote in my car after leaving the opening reception for Fallible: correcting and embracing history and memory, the Lesley University MFA Visual Arts thesis exhibition.
Opening receptions have a familiar rhythm. Friends embrace. Faculty members catch up over wine. Strangers drift quietly from photograph to photograph, careful not to stand in front of someone else’s view for too long. This reception seemed no different at first.
I was there to see Tynan Byrne’s contribution. Byrne has spent years making photographs and books that explore identity, memory, intimacy, and queer representation. Working primarily in black-and-white film, the themes of friendship, domestic life, queer sociality, and the community surrounding him have created the foundations of an autobiographical archive. In his contribution to Fallible we see them placed under extraordinary pressure through his lens.
how strange others’ hands on the body that you love occupied a smaller gallery tucked beyond the larger reception space and summer humidity swept in every time the door opened and bodies filled the room. By the time visitors filtered through the crowd and reached the entrance to Byrne’s installation, another presence had settled into the exhibition as unmistakably as the sheen of the evening had settled onto our skin.
The gallery was hot.
It was an accident of architecture, weather, and attendance, but it dissolved some of the clinical distance galleries often impose between artwork and viewer. Byrne’s images are deeply invested in touch, proximity, and the physical realities of care. In that room, warmth made the photographs feel less observed than inhabited. It became difficult to experience intimacy as an abstract idea while sweating beside strangers, and impossible to look at bodies embracing, walking through summer woods, or existing together in quiet domestic moments without registering one’s own physical presence.
The exhibition became, quite literally, palpable. It was corporeal in a way the artist could not have planned, but that the work was uniquely capable of absorbing.
The installation moved from domestic intimacy to clinical spaces, into vast landscapes, and back again around the perimeter of the room. Large black-and-white photographs, made with Byrne’s preferred Pentax 6×7 camera, were paired with fragments of prose applied directly to the purple surface of a wall constructed at the gallery’s center. Nothing immediately announces itself upon entering because Byrne asks us to walk before asking us to understand. Their control over how the viewer moves through space grants us permission to approach moments of profound intimacy only after earning them movement and patience. Every transition subtly reset the emotional register without ever allowing the exhibition to become predictable.
Almost imperceptibly, the room was teaching you how to look.
The purple walls were more than architecture, and the writing was not merely explanatory wall text. Together, they formed a second medium running alongside the photographs. The prose was intensely literary and emotionally explicit, while Byrne’s image titles remained remarkably restrained. The walls created moments of enclosure in which the writing seemed to whisper before releasing the viewer back into the photographic sequence. Image and language did not explain one another so much as create an emotional current between them. The photographs asked the viewer to observe; the writing asked us to remember what observation alone cannot communicate.
At the center of the exhibition sat the one photograph that refused to disappear into the surrounding sequence. Mounted on the interior wall rather than along the gallery’s perimeter and cradled by strong directional light that left much of the purple surface in shadow, it interrupted the viewer’s movement as decisively as the emergency it represented had interrupted Byrne and his partners lives.
Simply titled “First Meal,” the photograph showed Richie, Byrne’s partner and a recurring presence throughout the project, lying in a hospital bed as he lifted food toward his mouth. His arm partially obscured his face and medical equipment surrounded him, but Byrne resisted the visual language of catastrophe. He chose instead the unbearable ordinariness of hospitalization: eating, waiting and enduring the fluorescent stillness between moments of crisis. The achievement implied by a “first meal” existed alongside the vulnerability of the scene, without either sensation canceling the other.
On either side of the photograph, the prose continued. The passage to the left introduced the clinicians’ hands, “white and blue gloved and sterile,” whose touch was competent, decisive, and necessarily different from the touch of a loved one. The passage on the right considered how those hands could care deeply while serving a fundamentally different purpose. Reading from one side to the other across Richie’s body mirrored the emotional transfer from private intimacy to clinical intervention. The sparse arrangement and generous negative space reinforced the isolation of the hospital experience while physically placing the image between two forms of care.
The project’s title, how strange others’ hands on the body that you love, therefore became less a description than a condition governing the entire installation. Hands did not always appear as the photographs’ obvious subjects, but they shaped how every act of touch was understood. A lover’s hands, medical hands, hands that hold, hands that examine, and hands forced to surrender control accumulated across image and text until even photographs without visible touch seemed to carry its memory.
On the opposite side of the interior wall, Byrne had placed two photographs together near a corner. I slowed as I approached them.
One was filled with IV poles, tubing, and the rigid verticals of hospital equipment. The other was crowded with dense trees. Both offered only partial glimpses of Richie behind their foregrounds. At first glance they belonged to entirely different worlds. Yet the more I looked, the more the forms began echoing one another. Branches became wires. Trunks became machines. Both photographs obscured as much as they revealed because they weren’t opposites, they were visual rhymes of parallel environments. Byrne was illustrating two different landscapes through which he has searched for the person he loves.
Byrne’s decision to work in black-and-white further collapsed distinctions that color might otherwise have emphasized. Forests, skin, hospital rooms, apartments, clouds, machines, and bodies all occupied a shared tonal vocabulary. Rather than visually separating ordinary life from medical crisis, Byrne allowed light, grain, texture, and contrast to carry the emotional weight. Hospital and home did not become opposing chapters. They remained parts of one continuous existence.
Because the one question Byrne never answers is: before or after?
Was a photograph made before the emergency or after it? Did a particular scar carry the answer? Did the apparent peace of a domestic scene place it before catastrophe, or reveal that peace had eventually become possible again?
Near the final photograph was Byrne’s artist’s book, a publication of more than 200 pages combining images, poetry, and short prose. It was repeatedly surrounded by a crowd. The book promised an expanded version of the project and, perhaps, the possibility of a more complete account. I wondered whether the book would tell me precisely what had happened and when. By the time I could get close enough to turn its pages, however, reconstructing the timeline felt less urgent than understanding what Byrne wanted me to know.
Byrne does not owe viewers a chronology, nor does he attempt to provide one. Trauma rarely arrives with neat beginnings and endings, and recovery rarely follows a satisfying narrative arc. Reducing how strange others’ hands on the body that you love to a project about survival would also require reducing Byrne’s artistic identity to the crisis that entered it. Nothing about the work permits such a narrow reading.
Long before hospital rooms entered the frame, Byrne was photographing queer bodies, domestic intimacy, and the fragile ways photographs construct identity. His camera has always lingered where representation becomes a relationship in an effort to create the kind of art he didn’t have access to growing up. The medical emergency did not replace that ethos, it only placed them in unfamiliar circumstances and revealed how necessary they already were.
Rather than merely reconstructing events, Byrne continued examining how events alter relationships: between lovers and clinicians, bodies and memories, private experience and public representation, individual identity and community. The project ultimately asks how we continue seeing one another fully when life threatens to reduce someone to a patient, a diagnosis, a scar, or a single chapter.
By the time I was preparing to leave, the crowded reception had begun to reveal itself differently. These were not simply attendees. This was the living community that had grown around the photographs and survived alongside them. One person was the artist’s mother. Another was a professor. Another had stood beside a hospital bed. Another had almost lost someone. Friends who had known Byrne’s work before the emergency stood beside visitors learning the story for the first time.
The exhibition escaped its physical boundaries and made the room beyond it part of the work.
Somewhere among the conversations was the man whose body filled so many of Byrne’s photographs: the man whose hands had been held by strangers in blue gloves, whose scars now appeared on gallery walls, and who, one ordinary morning, had nearly disappeared.
The Richie standing in the gallery was no longer confined to the images. He was larger than life, the kind of person I might immediately assume I was not cool enough to know. He laughed with visitors, embraced friends, and moved easily through the same rooms in which his most vulnerable moments were being seen by strangers.
Before leaving, I asked our mutual friend Amy what Richie thought about attending an exhibition where he existed simultaneously as subject, story, and spectator.
She laughed.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “He loves it.”
Of course he does. Byrne had never been asking viewers to witness catastrophe. He was asking us to witness a life, a relationship, and a body of work that refused to become defined by it. Richie was not trapped inside the photographs. He was standing among them, participating in their meaning and reminding everyone in the room that representation is most powerful when the people depicted remain active authors of their own stories of love, memory, community, and identity.
That is what lingered after I left the gallery: the people standing in the room.
(Join Tynan Byrne on Wednesday, July 22 at 6 p.m. at the Lunder Arts Center for “an evening of readings” from a collection of works that accompany the images currently on display. Light fare and refreshments will be served. The “MFA Visual Arts 2026 Thesis Exhibition,” featuring Tynan Byrne, Katherine Finocchiaro, David Kessler, Ali Rajabi, and Morgan Silver, remains on view through July 24 at the Roberts and Raizes Galleries in the Lunder Arts Center of Lesley University, 1801 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts. Call (617) 349-8010 to confirm gallery hours.)