Book Review: New Queer Photography: Focus on the Margins
© Damien Blottiére
Written by Andy Dion
Photography offers us a chance to peer into experiences of all walks of life through glass lenses, permitting our world to expand into different perspectives and realms. Queerness in photography has invented and reinvented itself like a long standing visual dictionary— codifying it, contradicting it, and so on. New Queer Photography: Focus on the Margins represents 52 queer photographers in an intersectional glimpse into the state of photographic queerness, as pervayed through an ever growing community of artists continuing to celebrate the queer experience.
In an age of increasing acceptance and cultural appreciation of the LGBTQIA+ community through television and social media, editor Benjamin Wolbergs noted that these communities still experience marginalization, violence, and bias. Wolbergs carefully researched and picked photographers both established and unknown to shine a light on the contemporary queer experience, illuminating its joys while also exposing the colonial origins of same-sex bans and challenges still faced today.
© Hao Nguyen
© Jan Klos
The photographs range through various genres from documentary to fashion yet their spirit feels intertwined within the context of the publication. In particular, photographers Hao Nguyen and Matt Lambert encapsulate youthful aesthetics with dreamy photos of models illuminating radiant selfhood similarly through their shared usage of red lighting. Nguyen secures a blissful kiss between a couple with a ray of red light shining from the closing gap between their wanton lips. Lambert captures another couple cozying under a red hot glow. These images represent the current kaleidoscopic aesthetic zeitgeist, amplified through instagram, with an energy of unfettered desire and presentness between lovers.
© Matt Lambert
Fashion photographs take on new meaning in New Queer Photography as they showcase the impeccable artifice of drag beauty while still allowing the viewer to appreciate the person in costume. The book’s subtitle aptly directs the eye to one of its key tenets: focusing on the margins. Each photograph represents more than its traditionally ascribed intention. Jan Klos’s drag performers stand in moments between performances, immortalized in the book’s pages. These images feel static, reflective, almost somber, as if asking the reader to acknowledge these quiet moments— the space normally uncelebrated. Michael Bailey-Gates shows a model adorned with glossy lips and eyelash extensions reaching out as if holding a mirror or a phone, echoing a familiar selfie pose. Oftentimes, images like these, especially on the internet are endlessly reproduced and codified, floating further away from the subject; here, they remain in print, patiently and beautifully humalized, still in that moment. In the context of New Queer Photography, these drag performers exist unhindered by television contracts or social bias. They are themselves.
New Queer Photography focuses on the margins between mainstream acceptance and more complex aspects of queerness as it relates to society and recognition. Soraya Zaman and Melody Melamed touch on the weight of gender affirming processes like top surgery; the healing wounds of surgery and the stitches are within this complex margin that Wolbergs asks readers to witness and acknowledge. Robin Hammond captures a model covering their face, backdropped by pink flowers. Their surroundings and clothing emit playful hot pink hues yet they hide their face, illustrating a protectivity ubiquitous to their experience.
© Melody Melamed
© Michael Bailey-Gates
While recent years heeded progress for the historically marginalized LGBTQIA+ community, subjects like gender fluidity and transsexuality remain on the fringes of these conversations.
The images in New Queer Photography situate the reader in a lovingly sourced visual experience that brings representation to queer photographers of the present moment and their lives by providing, through the images, a raw and poetic illustration of personal truths and perspectives.
