Agitprop by Joseph Harwood was an idea that was conceived in 2013. I had looked online for an LGBT creator that put out content that was different to my work and my group of friends did, but I was failing to find other genres of popular content. There were published outlets that focused on pop culture or gay specific media, but it all came back to the idea that if you were doing it independently, the creator had only to create beauty content and sell makeup. When you’re the leader on the scoreboard it’s really not a temptation to repeat the same game you’ve spent years playing, you look for a different league, so no, I was not interested in that business model at all.

At the time, I was working with a lot of the drag queens from Rupaul’s Drag Race and I did a few editorial shoots as a makeup artist for gay magazines. I have never read these types of publications and some of the focus really concerned me. I also felt that even in mainstream magazines when trans people had the moment to write a really powerful piece, they were using a sort of snarky tone or topic to bolster sensationalism. I totally get how algorithms work, I understand provocation as a means of propulsion so that whatever they want to do in their main trajectory could be heard bigger. But it was consistently at the cost of what I perceived to be the mainstream view of our community. So overall I found the media to be a specific voice, to require self-flagellation and ultimately spore from corny behavior. So I decided to turn my website into my version of a magazine. I won the You Generation Competition five years ago, I wanted to invest in something that would be a strong outlet.

The next project idea was to create a book that expressed my views as a visual artist, and so I developed a coffee table book and set out each page by the rules of numerology. I began to create amazing images that told stories about my thoughts on veganism, male fragility, and more, and it was becoming a very exciting prospect. I wanted to create a brand about Propaganda, so I looked into other words that summarised that feeling and Agitprop was so close to home for a variety of reasons I’ll eventually share. But as the stars aligned and I had confirmed a deal, I was in a spiral of bizarre situations that eventually left me stuck. For 18 months I was unable to film, create makeup and produce content to the standard that you’d expect from Joseph Harwood, and so Agitprop was put on the back burner.

During 2018 I began to focus in on my work and with some motivation from my partner, the thing that made me smile the most was cooking and finding fun ways to turn the food I made into images. He jokingly said I should start putting it out for people to see, and I went back to that same feeling as before, that there were no other trans people even doing things like food, or travel blogs. And I began to see that spark that had inspired me come back to life, so the second incarnation of Agitprop began. There was always a list of things that I wanted to do in my career and I managed to get all the work stuff I had in mind completed by the time I was 23, but I never had any success with travel bookings and so I thought, food, lifestyle, and travel. That’s something people would love to see, and it’s a challenge because everyone expects me to be the visual artist, so I began to just take photos during my work trips, my holidays. It grew completely organically.

I started to mock up the website and it was atrocious, I really had no idea what I was doing and I looked at a number of different styles, until I made a format that would work for me. I saw my Youtube layout and wanted to give my version of a social media site, and that’s how I designed it. Each image on the website is designed or painted by me, every piece of writing outside of Community is me, it hosts video content, an amazing podcast series, and nearly 100 vegan recipes. I have opened a community hub and have created an amazing outlet that is trans-led, but not LGBT focused and I am so proud of my accomplishment.

Each release hosts a series of blogs and a magazine cover, the first being the last image I took before my eye injury. It’s overlayed with my images of nature, something I am passionate about. It also nods to the shamanistic work I do, which at the moment draws me to the heart and the throat. These two colors are blue and green, and I started to begin to take new photos of me during 2020 and one of the eyes turned green during an experiment. It happened by pure accident but it just worked as such a symbol of what I’ve been through, with my injury, with finding new insight, with growing as an artist. So I am blown away by the reception, the doors that have been opened and the number of collaborations I’ve made as a business, it’s overtaken the last four years of my digital work in its first 6 months so I’m extremely blessed and can’t wait for it to expand.

Check out the work I’ve created and watch the video, images, design, artwork, and products on Agitprop.