Manifesto Book — © Stas Ginzburg

MANIFESTO QUEER POWER, TRANS POWER

selected book spreads
PHOTOGRAPHS BY STAS GINZBURG MANIFESTO BY QWEEN JEAN AFTERWORD BY ROHAN ZHOU-LEE

book dummy: 10.75x14 in. (27x35.5 cm.), 154 pages

Manifesto: Queer Power, Trans Power is the first major book project by Stas Ginzburg, a Brooklyn-based photographer and queer refugee from Russia. Over the past five years, Ginzburg has photographed queer and trans individuals at marches, rallies, and direct actions across the United States, capturing the strength, dignity, and defiance of LGBTQIA+ communities at the forefront of intersectional movements. Blending portraiture and reportage, the book serves as both a vital archive and a call to action in the face of escalating national anti-trans legislation.

Ginzburg’s work has been featured in the Aperture publication Revolution Is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation and published in The Guardian and The Sunday Times Magazine. He has exhibited internationally, including at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Queens Museum, and Photoville, NYC.

His recent awards and recognitions include:

Winner, Photo-Book Prize, Belfast Photo Festival, 2025
Winner, American Photography 40, 2024
Shortlisted, Sony World Photography Awards, 2025
Shortlisted, Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture, 2024

today we rise.
we rise to confront a nation crumbling under its own failures. we rise to demand a better world.

- qween jean

The book includes a powerful manifesto by Qween Jean, a visionary costume designer, community organizer, and the founder of Black Trans Liberation. A leading voice in the fight for trans rights, Qween has organized numerous actions across New York City and beyond, centering the experiences and leadership of Black trans people. Her manifesto is a powerful call to action, demanding radical love, collective resistance, and the dismantling of systems that seek to erase and control queer and trans lives. Rooted in both urgency and hope, her words frame the book’s visual narrative with clarity and purpose, reminding us that liberation is a shared struggle, without borders and across generations.

The afterword is an essay by Rohan Zhou-Lee, a writer, activist, and founder of Blasian March, a queer-led movement that unites Black, Asian, and Blasian identities through protests, free book fairs, and the performing arts. In their essay, Zhou-Lee traces the often-erased histories of queer and trans resistance across the African and Asian diasporas, calling for a return to ancestral knowledge, cross-racial solidarity, and the dismantling of white mythology. Through personal narrative and historical insight, the text bridges generations of queer activism and urges a radical reimagining of liberation beyond the binaries imposed by colonialism.

for our own survival, each of us must learn our stories regardless of race to create the next chapter.

- rohan zhou-lee

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