Photographers have been interested in human likenesses since photography’s inception in 1839. Due to the necessity of the technology, early sitters had to pose in rigid positions with unsmiling faces. Through the years as cameras have improved, photography has become second nature to many across the globe; we take pictures of everyday and extraordinary moments and everything in between. Artist photographers, however, are interested in making the everyday extraordinary, ensuring that we don’t take advantage of the wonders around us. This collection of photographs does just that but with a queer lens. Each of these artists takes the everyday wonder of identity and sexuality and stretches viewers’ imaginations.
The Queer Art movement that started in the 1970s took precedence from artists like Claude Cahun, a genderqueer photographer working in the early to mid-1900s. Cahun worked with artist and partner Marcel Moore to produce portraits that explore gender and sexuality. Later, during the start of the Queer Art movement, artist Catherine Opie began working, producing portraits of her friends in the LGBTQ+ community, including the leader and BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) communities. Another artist in the movement was Laura Aguilar, a lesbian Chicana photographer, who photographed patrons of the Plush Pony, a lesbian bar in the EL Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles, and her own fat, brown, queer body using the traditional landscape photograph.
Taking from these early practitioners of queer portrait photography, a new generation of queer photography artists emerges. This exhibition additionally focuses on three new artists with unique perspectives on photographic portraiture: Jess T. Dugan, Lex Barberio, and Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. Inspired by their queer communities and the queer artists that came before them, this group produces a new era of queer photography by centering queerness, humanizing their queer sitters, and undermining stereotypes about and negativity towards the queer community.
I hope you enjoy learning more about these queer artists, the old and the new, and seeing representations of yourself or the ones you love. The artists in this exhibition use photography to try to heal the wounds of the fine art world that ostracized anything different from heteronormativity and “straight” styles (realistic and technically perfect). Maybe you will be inspired to look at the world differently and with an eye for extraordinary identities in the everyday.
Featured Artists:
This exhibition website is a project for my WDC-640 class at Agnes Scott College. This is not a real exhibition. If you have any questions or concerns about this website or the artists featured here, please contact Camryn King at camrynmking@gmail.com. To see my portfolio, visit cmking.agnesscott.org
