As the year draws to a close, we look back at some of the most powerful photo stories published on AnOther, which shine a light on queer individuals, communities and creativity
Photography is an instrument for looking at – and capturing – the subject, but what happens when the subject looks back? “I remember being punished as a child for staring”, wrote bell hooks while discussing the idea of female spectatorship, “Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking”. If looking back contains the power to unsettle society, then its act suggests radical possibilities for queer photographers. Such politics have been put into practice by several image-makers this year whose work boldly observes, confronts and disobeys conventional modes of representation.
Consider Carson Stachura’s arresting portraits of transgender people in their bedrooms whose reciprocal gaze reminds us we are guests in their intimate worlds, or Dean Sameshima, whose work invites the viewer to peer into the vanishing architecture of queer, public erotica. Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s multi-media art highlights the tension between seeing and being seen through mirror installations, while Zanele Muholi’s photographs of hate crime survivors allow queer South Africans to recognise their own stories and images as they navigate censorship.
Below, read more about ten of the best LGBTQ+ photo projects featured on AnOther this year.
Pacifico Silano captures gay male identity through a raw lens. InShadow Cast, images from vintage gay porn are rasterized, cropped and imbued with new meaning. His retro subjects – nude men in the act of sex – are re-photographed by the artist with a macro lens, exploding their pixels and obscuring their original contexts. The effect is a series of intimate portraits containing, as Silano describes, the tension between “desire … danger and being in the shadows”.
“I think photography has always been the queer medium,” says iconic American photographer and artist, Jack Pierson. His self-titled solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery – his first in 20 years – embraces a punk, DIY ethos. Rejecting technical formalism in photography for raw intimacy, the show serves as an ode to the queer community. Upon arrival, viewers are greeted with a brilliant gold sculpture that reads: “YOU ARE THE SUN”. For Pierson, punk politics and aesthetics are inherently tied to the history of photography.
Peter Hujar's black-and-white Portraits in Life and Death exhibition, shown at the Venice Biennale, captures the artistic milieu of the 1970s Lower East Side alongside eerie images of mummified bodies in Palermo’s catacombs. The exhibition features some well-known faces: John Waters, Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz. By placing these faces quite literally next to death – images of entombed figures – Hujar transforms his living subjects into spectral figures immortalised by the camera. In 1987, Hujar himself died of an Aids-related illness.
For Zanele Muholi, whose portraits of queer South Africans were displayed at SFMOMA and Tate, photography is a social medium: “I get an opportunity to meet people through other people they trust”, the photographer says. It is precisely this potential of photography to gather people into a coherent space – where their histories and relationships are rendered visible – that formed the nexus of theirEye Me exhibition, held this January. The show offers poignant visual stories that illuminate the resilience, beauty and complexity of queer, South African lives.
If photography is a lens on power and relationships, then trust is central to this work Carson Stachura’s sensual portraits of their transgender friends. Entitled My Body Is a Weapon, Stachura reappraises the normative framework in which their community is perceived – namely “the violence of being looked at without consent”. Alongside photographs of Stachura’s queer chosen family, the series is embedded with everyday objects which likely hold special meaning to a trans audience. Still lifes of pills and packets, syringes and cigarettes highlight the minutiae of trans embodiment while rendering the mundane meaningful.
Published by Mack, A Forest Fire Between Us catalogues the work of Tee Corinne as one of the most prolific lesbian photographers of the 70s and beyond. Corinne once claimed in her 1993 artist statement that she had “the wrong kind of personality to be making art out of sexual imagery” due to her anxiety about receiving negative press. Despite this, she created powerful and affirming visions of queer womanhood. In this series, the artist places sapphic desire in sensuous, biophilic environments, demonstrating her radical approach to documenting lesbian culture.
“Who is Andy Warhol?” is a question that has saturated pop culture because it has endless answers. This is a result of Warhol’s constant process of reinvention, of his art and his image. This year, The Jon Gould Collection of Andy Warhol Photographs opened up a previously unseen side of the artist, revealing how he saw others. For the first time, his secret relationship with Gould – the 26-year-old executive at Paramount Pictures – could be told in full with 300 of his photographs. The collection captures a candid, playful Gould while lending a rare glimpse into the romantic perspective of Warhol.
Dean Sameshima’s photographic practice is a stunning example of how queer artists have turned the aesthetics and architectures of cruising culture into sites of creative expression. At Soft Opening in London, Sameshima presented being alone, a solo show exploring the gradual loss of erotic locations in public space, something the artist describes as the “tension regarding time and history”. Displaying photographs of glory holes, screens and nude men holding cameras, Sameshima invites the spectator to engage with a fading world of fantasy.
In 1961, Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union to the West, where he would become a revolutionary figure in male ballet and a muse to photographer, Colin Jones. This year, his legacy continued to influence visual culture, inspiring Kim Jones’s Dior Men’s Autumn/Winter 2024 collection. In a statement, the Dior creative director described his memories of his uncle Colin Jones’s darkroom, where he was first introduced to the role of beauty in art. Colin’s elegant portraits portray an unapologetic, graceful Nureyev whose defiance shaped his art.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s self–portraits use each part of the frame including the space beyond. In his aptly named Exposure exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, all the crucial elements of image-making are on show: the tripod, the camera, the studio, the sitter and the mirror structures that duplicate their naked forms. As such, Sepuya invites the viewer to reflect on the intimate relationship between our environment and the construction and mediation of identity. The portraits are, in Sepuya’s own words, “not only images of desire but also images about the making of images”.
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