This new photobook celebrates the long history of queer photography

For hun­dreds of years, queer his­to­ry has been hid­den in plain sight, its artists cast­ing their gazes in a myr­i­ad of ways, encod­ed in our con­structs of beau­ty, desire, sta­tus, and wealth. Photography’s arrival in 1839 sig­nalled a remark­able shift, plac­ing the pow­er of image-mak­ing in the hands of the peo­ple rather than the estab­lish­ment. For those dri­ven to cre­ate, vis­i­bil­i­ty quick­ly became an act of resis­tance against mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion, and erasure. 

Think­ing about ques­tions like ​“how do we find queer com­mu­ni­ty?” and ​“how do we find our his­to­ry?” Zori­an Clay­ton, Cura­tor of Prints at London’s Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, delved into the col­lec­tion to cre­ate Call­ing the Shots: A Queer His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy (Thames & Hud­son). Tak­ing the words of pho­tog­ra­ph­er Cather­ine Opie as its depar­ture point – ​“I will wave a rain­bow flag proud­ly, but I am not a sin­gle iden­ti­ty” – Call­ing the Shots is a nod to inclu­siv­i­ty in its many-splen­dored forms. 

Drawn from the mon­u­men­tal pho­tog­ra­phy col­lec­tion at the V&A, the book fea­tures a wealth of works made by and about LGBTQIA+ com­mu­ni­ties world­wide. Organ­ised across six the­mat­ic chap­ters (Icons, Staged, Body, Lib­er­ty, Mak­ing a Scene, and Beyond the Frame), Call­ing the Shots explores the inter­sec­tions of pho­tog­ra­phy, iden­ti­ty, image mak­ing, and activism in the work of ground­break­ing artists includ­ing Robert Map­plethor­pe, Zanele Muholi, Liz John­son Artur, Sunil Gup­ta, Mari­ette Pathy Allen, and Leonard Fink.

From the very begin­ning, pho­tog­ra­phy offered free­dom and escape from an oppres­sive soci­ety. Point­ing to the work of Anne Brig­man, the only woman in the Pic­to­ri­al­ist Move­ment at the turn of the 19^th cen­tu­ry, Clay­ton says: ​“There were all these men going on pho­to­graph­ic expe­di­tions and tak­ing along peo­ple to car­ry their huge amounts of kit, and she was just doing it all by her­self, with a cou­ple of women friends. They went deep out into the Cal­i­for­nia hills and took pho­tographs of each oth­er, naked in the beau­ti­ful sur­round­ings, and there’s a lot of queer joy and beau­ty in those photos.” 

In the years before Stonewall, ver­nac­u­lar pho­tog­ra­phy became the lin­gua fran­ca of the queer under­ground, its end­less DIY appli­ca­tions pro­vid­ing a read­i­ly acces­si­ble workaround homo­pho­bic and trans­pho­bic laws. While many of the pho­tog­ra­phers and sub­jects have been lost to time, what remains is a glimpse of love, plea­sure, and pride. 

With the Gay Lib­er­a­tion Move­ment of the ​’70s dove­tail­ing with photography’s arrival into the realms of fine art, queer iconog­ra­phy became a defin­ing voice of the new mil­len­ni­um. ​“As peo­ple start to open up their lives, homes, bars, clubs, and com­mu­ni­ties, we start to real­ly see inside queer spaces and the mean­ing of that,” says Clayton.

But as the ris­ing tide of the far right con­sumes the Glob­al North, the lessons of the past are ever more res­o­nant today. ​“We need uni­ty in order to weath­er this storm, and I absolute­ly believe it is pos­si­ble,” Clay­ton says. 

“When you look back in his­to­ry, things like Sec­tion 28 and the Thatch­er years gal­vanised the com­mu­ni­ty in the best pos­si­ble way,” he con­tin­ues. ​“When you look back at the work made dur­ing the AIDS cri­sis, it is phe­nom­e­nal and beyond what­ev­er would have been cre­at­ed if it was­n’t for the sit­u­a­tion. Even though there’s so much grief, loss, and trou­ble around that, we pre­vailed. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.”

Call­ing the Shots: A Queer His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy is pub­lished by Thames & Hudson.

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