When Tops first appeared as a short film in 2024, it was brief and restrained, shaped by touch, breath and proximity. As a book, the project stretches out, unfolding as a series of still moments that reward slower attention. For artist Lindsay Perryman, who was keen to portray transmasculine vulnerability after their own experience with top surgery, the move from film to book was never about translation, but continuation. 'After the short film, I thought it was necessary to continue it,' they say. 'The complexity comes through when you include different people’s perspectives.'
Where the film’s intimacy lies in closeness, the book introduces reflection. Still images allow motifs to recur and meaning to surface gradually, often only in hindsight. Scars, which Perryman has described as taking on new significance during the editing process, register here less as evidence of surgery than as signs of care, of having been held, attended to and supported. That care also extends beyond what is visible. It appears in the practical knowledge exchanged between people, from advice and reassurance, to recommendations passed from one person to another. Healing is not framed as an individual experience, but as something shaped collectively.
One of the most compelling aspects of Tops is how it understands community. Care does not sit alongside the work as sentiment; it gives the work its structure. 'I would hope that people see that community is very important,' Perryman says, 'in all aspects of queer life. I also hope the work invites those outside that community to witness without spectacle.'
That refusal of spectacle runs throughout the book. The images are calm and unforced, resisting the neutrality of the studio in favour of bedrooms and lived-in spaces. Healing, Perryman insists, happens at home. Subjects appear at ease and unguarded, and the camera stays close without intrusion. At moments, the act of photographing appears in a mirror or reflection, not as self-assertion but as an acknowledgement of presence. Authorship here is relational, with the photographer positioned inside the conditions of trust that make the work possible.
More recently, Perryman’s practice has begun to move beyond photography. 'I used to identify strictly as a photographer,' they say. 'But this work pushed me to explore other mediums.' Cyanotypes and sculptural forms are emerging as part of a growing archive. The impulse remains consistent: to create records that take up space, that can be physically encountered, and that resist erasure through their material presence. 'I didn’t see much of this kind of work when I was growing up,' Perryman says. “Making something that could exist in history felt important. For my younger self, and for others.'
Ultimately, Tops brings into view forms of support that often go undocumented. It doesn’t offer resolution, but recognition: of shared knowledge, and the quiet ways people look after one another. In doing so, it frames archiving not simply as preservation, but as an ongoing responsibility.
TOPS is published by Palm* Studios
