In photos: 14 years of artist Love Bailey’s life and transition
- Text by Miss Rosen
Dancing on the Fault Line — Photographer Nick Haymes’s new book explores a decade-plus friendship with the Californian artist and activist, drawing intimate scenes from thousands of pictures.
Where some photographers helicopter in for a story, Nick Haymes plays the long game, building relationships that span years, sometimes decades, tracing the long arc of history as it unfolds in real time.
In the final pages of his 2012 monograph, GABEtm, which saw him follow and photograph actor Gabe Nevins, Haymes took a picture of Love Bailey for the first time, the California native playing a critical role in helping to save the book’s protagonist from crashing out. “Bailey knew where the kids hustle in LA,” Haymes says. “She was the one who found Gabe and got him off the streets. We connected when he went back home at the end.”
From that auspicious beginning, Haymes and Bailey forged a bond born of comfort and care – of seeing and being seen as acts of courage, strength, and devotion. With the May 15 launch of Dancing on the Fault Line (Kodoji Press) at the LA Art Book Fair, Haymes brings us inside Bailey’s world, chronicling her journey as an artist and trans woman over the past 14 years. “Bailey is more than a muse, she is a friend,” says Haymes. “We keep coming back together because it becomes something more than just the photographs.”
Born to a migrant father who fled the Iranian Revolution and an incarcerated mother who survived the USA’s 20th century war on drugs, Bailey was raised by her maternal grandparents – Colonel and Betty Bailey. Her grandmother was a former Rockette and seasoned showgirl, and through her Bailey discovered the transformative power of glamour, performance, and theatre as a young child.
Growing up in the suburbs of San Diego, California, Bailey was the only boy on the all-girl dance squad before launching her Bailey X collection, which included a raunchy photoshoot of the squad girls and boy jocks taking “suggestive” poses. But after the images were left as a screensaver at the school’s computer lab, the administration banned her from attending the prom. “It was my first real serving of controversy and rebellion, and it tasted sweet. I’d struck a nerve, and I craved more,” Bailey writes in the book. “From that moment on a new way of life crystallised for me. It was sink or swim.”
Haymes remembers seeing those early photographs and being intrigued by a character so dazzling, she practically leapt off the page. “Bailey is everything I am not,” Haymes says. “I sit behind the camera, so I am a little quieter. That’s not who she is. She didn’t give a damn what other people thought. She is totally free, the spirit I imagined California to be: outgoing, gregarious, fun, and carefree.”
For Haymes, the portrait is a study that can only be seen in full, through the kaleidoscopic shimmer of time captured in thousands of photographs made year in, year out. “Time is the most precious thing there is to anyone who’s alive,” he says. “I can’t just jump in somewhere fast, extract something, and draw conclusions. You have to give people space to breathe.”
Following the natural pace of life, Dancing on the Fault Line unfolds like a film, a portrait of the artist as a trans woman in discovery of herself, pushing the boundaries of possibility that is the very hallmark of youth. “I’ve been called every name imaginable and have been knocked down more times than I care to count,” Bailey writes. “But I always get back up, often in higher heels. Cracked, but never broken.”
“I’m Love Bailey. I’m a force of nature, a glitch in your system,” she continues. “When the world tried to cage me, I built my own spectacular goddamn circus. The road ahead is uncertain, marked with both new opportunities and fresh obstacles. But I’m equipped and ready for whatever comes next.”
Dancing on the Fault Line by Nick Haymes launches at the LA Art Book Fair, May 15 – 18, 2025.
Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.
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