Shooting the gays (PART 2)
It's Pride month - no better time to dive back into the discussion on photojournalism on gay and LGBTI+ communities
‘Tis the season - companies have changed their logos to varying shades of colourful rainbows (or not, in a new move), cashing in on the pink £/$/€, in the annual corporate colour splashing. The rainbow month is upon us, with all the baggage that it brings.
Are we all ready for our feeds to be bombarded with images of happy gays during their marches-cum-parades, or running from tear gas and plastic bullets if you’re in Istanbul? Gimp masks, Pup play, and all the other fabulous or fetish stuff? If not, look away from your news and social media feeds over the coming week.
If you missed ‘Shooting the gays’ part 1 - here’s the link to that.
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Pride of course is a good and valid excuse to talk about LGBT+ rights locally, and internationally, and the specific issues the ‘community’ faces. There are of course plenty of issues to discuss - but I’ll stick to the visual representation and photojournalistic ones here :)
Of course Pride can be a fabulous event, and a time when people feel emboldened and proud, and individuals have the safety net in numbers, to be themselves at marches on streets, etc. I’ve been to many Pride marches around the world, and always had a lovely time.
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**In case I didn’t do enough exhibitionist self-promo on social media - I spoke to the lovely William Armstrong, host of Turkey Book Talk, about some of my work on LGBT+ asylum and migration - if you can handle 30+ minutes of me talking nervously fast into my laptop, here’s the link, (and definitely subscribe to their Substack too!):
So in short, my gripes and groans aren’t with Pride marches or the Pride month itself at all, what usually ruffles my feathers is that images of us are usually just so bloody repetitive, shallow and reductive.
As discussed in the first part of this post a couple of months ago, it would be odd to represent any other minority community in such a one dimensional way, as either overly sexualised, and basically reducing us to who we sleep with, as if that’s the start and end of our identity.
BUT, not wanting to radiate the negative/hater vibe, plenty of these images can also be powerful for the viewer, and have done a lot to raise awareness of issues, and to represent those in the photographs. I’m merely offering my critical perspective from what I’ve seen over the past couple of decades in photojournalism and documentary photography on gay and LGBT+ topics. Critique is healthy in order to improve, my work and that of other colleagues.
Some lovely examples of LGBT+ photography we should see and celebrate, almost exclusively BY gay/LGBT+ photographers:
New Queer Photography book - a wide view on photography by and of queer people, covering a range of topics, including my SEXugees series
Annie Tritt’s Transcending Self series
Sunil Gupta’s Exiles and The New Pre-Raphaelites amongst a lot of his poetic work
Adrain Chesser’s powerful series 'I’ve got something to tell you’ - portraits of when he told his friends and family he had AIDS
Hal Fischer’s ‘Gay Semiotics’
Catherine Opie’s extensive work
Extras - stuff catching my eye this week, which you might enjoy:
A Photo Editor’s post on Instagram serving some harsh realities about photojournalism and the industry, by 45+ people working in it. Some nice visuals to the answers, and not surprisingly, it’s not very positive or optimistic.
BBC Podcast about future of journalism -
Ian Perry Grant applications are open - if you’re 24 or under & studying photography, you really should apply.
British Journal of Photography’s ‘Photography’s Queer New Wave’
Aperture - ‘How pictures can shape an essential history of queer life’
Jennifer Hattam’s ‘Istanbul etc.’ Substack and the special queer edition
Wishing everybody a lovely end to Pride month, and fingers crossed tomorrow won’t be too awful for people in Istanbul, and elsewhere around the world, who just want to march for one day a year to ask for equal rights. Onwards… 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ 👩❤️👩 👨❤️👨 Happy Pride!