Four Photographers who Captured the Glory of Diversity
Pioneers of queer photography, their talents shed light on a discriminated community that, since then, had much to say (and share).
Photography, as art, is a means by which we are able to reveal the world before our eyes, process it, give it a new meaning. Sometimes, what has been fragmented undergoes a metamorphosis and becomes sometyhing else, something unique and lasting. However, capturnig images that last for posterity has an even greater power: to revolutionize; be a social motive for change. From another of its angles, be a silent spectator. A witness to history.
Be that it is may, thanks for photography, we can understand our own human nature and evolution, both personal and collective, aand it is precisely this last aspect that we want to delve into. How has photography captured the glory of diversity over the last century?
Decades before Stonewall, a group of photographers were in charge of evidencing love in all its forms and diversity by portraying the queer community.
At L'Officiel, we have created a list of 4 unmissable photographers.
Marie Hoeg
In the mind to late Victorian era, artist such as Thomaas Eakins, beyond capturing homosexuality, charged their images with homoeroticism using the Greco-Roman style that was popular throughout the 19th century. A perfect alibi to disguise a romance between the same sexes as a platonic friendship, and at the same time go unnoticed from public scrunity.
On the line of costrume, towards the end of the century, a female figure stood out: Marie Høeg. Both she and her partner Bolette Berg assumed masculine characters and costumes in their collaborative studio work, subverting sexual and gender norms, though, crucially, they were not exhibited or published while they were still alive. The images are part of a private collection of photographs documenting their relationships.
Therese Frare
AIDS and HIV has existerd in other parts of the world before, however, doctors in the United Kingdom and the United States first found it in the early 1980s, primarily in the members of the queer population. This mass death was strongly felt among the communities.
All three photographers in the previous section died of the disease, and Therese Frare's 1990 photograph (of 32-year-old David Kirby has become one of the defining images of the horrific tragedy). Kirby was a gay activist who ahs stayed away from his family because he shared his sexual orientation with them. Some time later, upon informing them that he has contracted AIDs and that he was dying, they welcomed him back into the family. At the hospital, they realized how discriminatory the team of doctors and nurses treated him. It was David's mother who asked Therese to capture her last moments of life.
George Platt Lynes
He was an American homosexual photographer famous, mainly, for portraying male nudes. During the 1930s his greatest interest was in homoerotic photography, abundant in suggestive poses and not hiding the private parts of his models, although he did not show his work outside his inner circle.
Much of his work was on display until the 1990s. Today, his collection at the Kinsey Institute remains one of the largest in the world.
Diana Davis
One of the main figured of photojournalism that documented the feminist and gay liberation movements during the 1960s and 1970s, it was she who captured an image that remains one of the most important in the movement to this day: the photography portrays the legendary Stonewall bar, origin of the International Pride demostrations.
The self-taught artist photographed numerous pivotal moments in music and social justice movements.
