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<\/p>\nBy Trevor Fairbrother<\/p>\n
The Queer Lens project made me think about queer culture and camera culture as distinct phenomena that began in the Victorian era: each was a manifestation of modernity.<\/p>\n
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Left: the cover of Queer Lens featuring \u201cGay Liberation March on Times Square\u201d (1969) by Diana Davies. Right: placard for Queer Lens outside the Getty Museum, with a detail of Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton aka Fanny and Stella (ca. 1870) by Frederick Spalding. Photo pairing by author.<\/p>\n
The latest exhibition<\/a> that Paul Martineau has curated at the J. Paul Getty Museum is titled Queer Lens: A History of Photography and features more than 270 works by 157 artists.\u00a0 The show is accompanied by an impressive hardcover catalogue<\/a> of the same name\u00a0(Getty Publications, 342 pages, $65),\u00a0co-edited by Martineau and Ryan Linkof.\u00a0An extensive introduction and a richly illustrated chronology\u2014both co-written by the editors\u2014open the book, followed by five essays: two by artists (Ken Gonzales-Day, Catherine Opie), three by scholars (Jordan Bear, Alexis Bard Johnson, Derek Conrad Murray).\u00a0It has 207 plates of photographs included in the exhibition, and they are\u00a0organized\u00a0into the following chronological sections.<\/p>\n 1839-1900<\/p>\n Invented in 1839, the photographic enterprise evolved rapidly. By the 1850s, the glass plate negative made it possible to generate multiple prints on paper.\u00a0Amateur photography and camera clubs flourished in the 1880s. With the launch of the first mass-marketed camera, the Brownie, in 1900, photography reached a broad public.\u00a0Even though many early photographs were suppressed or destroyed during outbursts of homophobia, those that exist are evidence of queer lives.\u00a0For instance, the catalogue illustrates a hand-colored daguerreotype from around 1848 showing a tender moment between two reclining naked women\u2014likely produced in France for the international underground market in erotic imagery.\u00a0It also includes\u00a0Frederick Spalding\u2019s\u00a0portrait of two cross-dressing actors who performed in the late 1860s as stylish ladies named Fanny and Stella..<\/p>\n 1901-1945<\/p>\n In his 1900 study of \u201csexual inversion,\u201d Havelock Ellis concluded that homosexuality was usually present at birth and advised against attempting to \u201ccure\u201d it. Pictures in this section range from \u201cvernacular\u201d to \u201cfine art\u201d photographs. Some are informal records of same-sex friendships and social occasions, others are portraits of splendid self-involved careerists, including Bessie Smith, Marlene Dietrich, and Cecil Beaton. The most avant-garde works depict Claude Cahun and Marcel Duchamp as stylish, intelligent nonconformists. There are indications of the permissiveness that prevailed briefly in nightclubs in the \u201920s as well as glimpses of friendships formed between women serving in the armed forces and men in the priesthood.<\/p>\n Left: Unknown French maker, \u201cTwo Women Embracing,\u201d (ca. 1848), hand-colored daguerreotype, J. Paul Getty Museum. Right: JEB, \u201cPriscilla and Regina, Brooklyn, New York,\u201d 1979; image from JEB\u2019s book Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, courtesy Anthology Editions. Photo pairing by author.<\/p>\n 1946-1980<\/p>\n This period saw an increase in LGBTQ+ visibility, inspired in part by the fight against the American Psychiatric Association\u2019s listing of homosexuality as a mental illness. In 1947, Dr. Alfred Kinsey of the University of Indiana created a nonprofit institute devoted to \u201cSex Research.\u201d He worked with photographer George Platt Lynes who created representations of a same-sex sensibility and exploits. There was also a proliferation of male physique magazines, which Queer Lens alludes to with works by Bruce of Los Angeles and the Western Photography Guild. While such publications were not overtly political, they cultivated networks of people attuned to a \u201cgay gaze.\u201d The book reproduces pictures of J.J. Belanger, a World War II veteran, hugging and kissing a friend in 1953: these men could not be intimate in public, but they memorialized their intimacy behind the curtain of a photo booth. Numerous plates in this section reflect the tumultuous era when civil rights activists, feminists and the burgeoning Gay Liberation movement crusaded for societal change. They include a photograph of joyful young people leading a march on Times Square, taken by Diana Davies in 1969, and a supremely tender portrait of a Black lesbian couple at rest in a park, taken by JEB [Joan E. Biren] in 1979.<\/p>\n 1981-2020<\/p>\n In 1981, after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documented the disease eventually named AIDS, the gay community was maltreated and stigmatized on an unprecedented scale. Some plates in the section touch on the fear, anger and resilience that this unleashed. In 1990 four members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) went on to found the group Queer Nation, which fostered the move to reclaim the term \u201cqueer,\u201d turning an old, cruel slur into a contemporary term that connotes inclusivity and respect. The plates in this section include searing conceptual pictures by David Wojnarowicz and gorgeous unflinching depictions of defiantly queer individuals by Catherine Opie. There are also visionary works by Texas Isaiah and Tourmaline, representatives of a new generation of artists who celebrate Black, trans, and queer voices.<\/p>\n The blurb on the book\u2019s back cover declares: \u201cQueer Lens: A History of Photography is the first major publication to survey the history of photography through a prism of queerness.\u201d Today\u2019s leading American art museums often stoop to this kind of self-promoting chatter, but, ironically, this particular boast is contradicted by Martineau and Linkof in their \u201cIntroduction.\u201d They mention a recent publication by British art historians Flora Dunster\u00a0and Theo Gordon \u2013 Photography: A Queer History<\/a> (Ilex Press, 2024) \u2013 which is devoted to the same subject matter.\u00a0 Alas, the co-authors of the Getty\u2019s catalogue cannot resist one-upmanship: \u201c[Photography: A Queer History] includes a comprehensive look at queer photography in a visual sense, but its thematic structure, with short essays and artist biographies, precludes a deep dive into the material.\u201d There is yet another insightful and copiously illustrated book on this topic: Calling the Shots: A Queer History of Photography<\/a>, edited by Zorian Clayton (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2024). The British publications from 2024 did not accompany museum exhibitions. All told, these three queer\/photo books are handsomely produced and they productively investigate the intersecting histories of photography and queer culture. I don\u2019t care which one might deserve a medal for the deepest dive, but, for what it\u2019s worth: only the V&A\u2019s book fails to mention academic writers Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault; the two British books include Alvin Baltrop, a Black artist who recorded the pre-AIDS queer scene in lower Manhattan, but the Getty\u2019s book does not; the Getty\u2019s catalogue applauds commercial photographers David LaChapelle and Herb Ritts and the other books ignore them.<\/p>\n Photographs of J. J. Belanger and his friend in a photo booth in Hastings Park, Vancouver (ca, 1953); in the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries. Photo pairing by author.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/2-1.png\")
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