Queer in Practice
by Laura Guy
Issue 79 Summer 2014
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Is there such a thing as ‘Queer Photography’ and if so how could we go about writing its history?
‘Queer’ was reclaimed by members of the AIDS activist community during the late 1980s as a sign under which to organise politically. Within these recent histories of gay and lesbian struggle, queer also became a means for some to trouble the hard and fast categories implied by naming either of those orientations. Functioning as a kind of umbrella under which it is possible to assemble a plethora of identifications, queer simultaneously disturbs the logic that binds a subject to a fixed identity. Given this, how does one reconcile something so unstable as queer with something as amorphous as photography?
Like many communities, groups that ally through queerness often affirm relationships through photographs that circulate both off and online. Yet, if there is nothing essential about queer, there also cannot be anything essentially queer about photography. In order to think of the two together, it seems only possible to look at how they coincide at particular moments.
The 1980s provides us with a number of
such moments, when the relations between
photography and queerness were thrown into
particular relief. The initial years of the AIDS
epidemic, the on-going Campaign for
Homosexual Law Reform in Ireland and the
legislative changes made under Section 28, that
prohibited ‘pretended family’ relationships
from being ‘promoted’ in places like schools,
provide a political backdrop for the
photography practices that engaged with gay
and lesbian issues in that era. To look at how
these practices might be retrospectively
constituted as queer ones, one could take into
account the contributions made by various
people including, among others, Tessa Boffin,
Jean Fraser, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex
Hirst, Sunil Gupta, Rosy Martin with Jo
Spence, Jill Posener and Simon Watney. One
could also look at how their photographic and
publishing projects operated within a broader
network of practitioners and so-called
independent photography organisations that
supported, sometimes, these practices. Along
with initiatives like Camerawork and the
Format Photography Agency, other venues
where photography was disseminated, such as
the US magazine On Our Backs and its UK counterpart Quim, could also be considered. In
these contexts and more, photography
intersected not only with gay and lesbian
politics but also with feminism and with issues
of gender, disability, race and class. These
concerns, which coalesced around identity and
visibility, both informed, and were informed by,
the emergent debates surrounding photography
and the politics of representation.
Dress, digital print with magic
marker and correction fluid
(2013) from Ken. To Be Destroyed by Sara Davidmann
Though formal histories of these formative
practices are patchy to say the least, their
legacies can be felt in various ways. In a recent
commission undertaken by Anthony Luvera for
Photoworks, photography facilitated the
articulation of a shared queer identity.
Responding to their location in Brighton,
widely reported to be the ‘Gay Capital’ of
Britain, Photoworks commissioned Luvera to
work with a group in the city to explore
through photography what the term queer
might mean to them. The process developed
into the project Not Going Shopping (named as
such after a chant that challenges commercial
participation in Pride marches) that was
disseminated in the form of photographic
posters pasted across the city. The project also
included the publication of an anthology, Queer in Brighton, that articulated through vernacular
photographs and oral history testimonies a
community organised, albeit disparately,
around queerness. Building upon
methodologies that he has developed in his
previous work, Luvera engaged critically with
the recent history of identity-based practices. In
doing so the project sought to address
questions of visibility pertaining to both past
and contemporary queer experiences.
Quim magazine issue 1, Summer 1989
Another intersection, this time between
photography and queer theory, can be found in
a number of initiatives established by staff at
London College of Communication. A recent
exhibition by research fellow Sara Davidmann
at the Photography and the Archive Research
Centre demonstrated one way in which queer
work is currently being supported within an
academic setting. Davidmann’s on-going Ken. To Be Destroyed reworked material from her
family archive in order to retrospectively
inscribe the trans experience of the person she
had known as her uncle ‘Ken’ into the album
precisely through revealing its unspoken
absences. The exhibition also worked to
demonstrate the reciprocal nature of theory
and practice with various canonical texts from
queer studies placed within the show. It is
significant that at present the field of queer
studies carries a certain weight within academia
though equally important to note that these
debates are not necessarily ones engaged with
on photography courses. A special issue of the
journal Photography and Culture focusing on
queerness and photography, co-edited by
Davidmann with Bruno Ceschel, founder of
Self Publish, Be Happy, and Toronto based
scholar Elspeth Brown, is forthcoming in
Autumn 2014. No doubt this will mark an
important intervention in the field.
On Our Backs, Autumn 1985
The notion of institutional validation is a
difficult one for practices that often locate their political potentiality at the margins. Exactly
why and how practices move from the
peripheries toward the centre varies according
to each example. Yet institutionalisation of once
radical forms usually requires a process of
negotiation that is not always entered into
willingly and most likely is enacted on the terms
of the dominant power. When Dick Hebdige
wrote in the late 1980s about the irreconcilable
distance that separated independent
photography magazine TEN.8 from fashion
magazine The Face, he articulated one apparent
shift from a politically engaged independent
photography to more ironic, more ambiguous
and slicker forms. The visual iconography of
queer culture nurtured by photographers like
Nan Goldin has in the last two decades become
apparent in commercial advertising. Adoption
into these hegemonic practices, indeed
seemingly becoming hegemonic themselves,
requires an emptying out of political possibility
and recoding of meaning. Queer
problematically becomes style.
French Kiss (2013), Alix Marie
A comparable shift was charted by Adrian
Rifkin during a recent event at the
Photographers’ Gallery. The evening, organised
to celebrate the fourth birthday of Self Publish,
Be Happy, was billed as a ‘Photobook Orgy’. It
was introduced by Bruno Ceschel whose
recollection of a nascent queer desire
encountered through photography and print set
the tone for what followed. A series of readings
from the new edition of The Photobook Review, edited by Ceschel, moved fluidly between
bodies, images, objects and screens. Rifkin’s
contribution reminded us that the site of a wellused
photolab, once located opposite the
gallery, was now home to SweatBox, a sauna
for gay men that looks from the outside like a
generic gym. The orgy it seemed was going on
elsewhere. We were left rehearsing Adam
Broomberg’s gruesome anecdote of his teenself
wanking over a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, an important conciousness-raising
tome of the 1970s women’s movement. It was
enough to turn this feminist right off. The
trouble with orgies is that everything is up for
grabs.
Self Portrait as Autumn Tree (2011), Ochi Reyes
Rifkin’s remark struck a cord as it linked the diminishing number of photolabs, precipitated by digitisation, to Soho’s queer history, newly sanitised and repackaged as SweatBox Ltd. Presumably much of the seedier stuff has gone online as well. Our location in the new gallery building threw the rapid gentrification of the area into even starker relief. As queer work is attracting the attention of the photography and artworld, the spaces for marginal practices become fewer and fewer. Public spending cuts associated with economic austerity, the gentrification of cities, crippling rents, the increasing marginalisation of non-urban experience, the ongoing effects of AIDS and the emphasis on assimilation implied, for example, by the campaign for same-sex marriage all contribute to the lessening of contexts for both queer lives and, by extension, queer art.
When I began this article I pasted a few
images at the top of the document as an
invocation of the contemporary queer
photography in the UK and Ireland about which I was trying to write. Initially feeling like
I was writing from the outside, in the sense that
I do not see myself as a member of any
photography community organised around
queerness, I imagined that at some point during
the research process the notion of a queer
photography practice would solidify. In its
absence these few photographs that offered a
starting point became a kind of queer
imaginary that now seems exactly right for the
subject. In these images, by people like Jonny
Briggs, Emma Haugh, Christa Holka, Alix
Marie and Sarah Pucill queerness and
photography appear to cohere briefly in ways
that resist formation into a canonical practice.
Among them were photographs by Ochi Reyes
and Åsa Johannesson, two practitioners whose
work seems to reinvest through photography in
the political potentiality that queerness has
historically offered. Reyes’ photographs
foreground photography as an ephemeral
process that speaks to the ways in which
identification is oriented through sometimes
momentary exchanges between bodies, objects
and images. She often utilises forms of
camouflage that permit the body to appear only
fleetingly. Cumulatively Reyes’ images seem to
describe subjectivity as an ongoing process.
Negotiated through the materiality of the
photographic medium, this process registers as
a series of temporally discrete encounters and
tactile surfaces.
Untitled from the series Belonging (2012), Åsa Johannesson
Åsa Johannesson also engages with portraiture as a genre that has performed an instrumental role in discussions around identity and representation. These pictures that focus on the performance of non-heteronormative gender are often located in woodland settings. Utilising codes of the documentary genre, they play subtly with notions of the natural. Like Reyes, she is interested in how queerness is generated within a process of recognition that is here mediated through photography. Yet for Johannesson, working with photography registers a calculated risk as the medium carries with it its own history in taxonomising and disciplining deviant bodies. It is a history that is always already in tension with the political potentiality of queerness. Instead of seeking to deconstruct or expose the impositions that culture places on our bodies, Johannesson’s visual language relies on ambiguity as it speaks to and through expressions of an ideal. Resemblance is all that is promised by the photograph as within the image identities take on endlessly mutable forms. The work of these photographers is thus richly suggestive of the possibilities that a term like queer still offers photography and vice versa. Queer unfixes. Perhaps then, photography is queer at moments when it too resists fixity in order that it might begin to sustain other kinds of lives.
With thanks to Brenda Burrell, Emma Campbell, Elly Clarke, Bruno Ceschel, Phyllis Christopher, Rachel Cunningham, Emma Haugh, Simon Watney and other friends for discussing aspects of this article with me.