“Queer Lens: A History of Photography” is a sprawling survey of more than 270 works from the last two centuries that looks at the ways cameras transformed the expression of gender and sexuality. Scores of artists as well-known as Berenice Abbott, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray and Edmund Teske hang with more than a dozen unknowns. The Getty Museum’s groundbreaking Pride Month show is provocative and important, and the timing packs a wallop.
The exhibition has been in the works for years (since 2020), but coincidentally, it opens during a state of national emergency. The ACLU is tracking 597 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in state legislatures across the U.S., including six in California. (Texas leads the hate-pack, with 88.) Most won’t pass. All, however, mean to intimidate just by being introduced. The show conjures an oppressive frame of social reference again and again.
Often it is subtle. Take the simple black-and-white photo-booth snapshot in which a kissing couple of 20-something young men was memorialized around 1953 by Canadian-born American artist Joseph John Bertrund Belanger. Their mouths smashed together, one man looks with a heavy-lidded gaze at the other, his eyes shut but his open hand raised, fingers brushing his beloved’s throat. Tight framing in the contained privacy of a photo booth underlines an image of passionate intimacy.
However, imagine if they were to step outside the curtain and into Vancouver’s Playland Amusement Park, where the picture was made, for the very same kiss. They would face possible arrest and imprisonment for “gross indecency” under the country’s antigay criminal code. (That law wasn’t lifted until 1969.) Belanger was a World War II veteran who fought with ordinary distinction against a fascist German regime rampaging across Europe — one that launched its reign of terror with the 1933 burning of a homosexual’s library on a Berlin public square. In 1944, the fellow pilot with whom Belanger had a private wartime romance was killed in combat.
This modest postwar photograph resounds because it pictures the photo booth as a closet. Was that the artist’s intention in making it? We don’t know, but the result is compelling because it is at once profoundly personal, which is obvious from the deep kiss, while extremely exotic, since queer images like this are rarely seen, never mind celebrated. That bracing fusion recurs in gallery after gallery.
The vivifying dichotomy is even announced in advance. Climb the stairs in front of the museum, its risers smartly painted as a cheerful rainbow flag that visually sets the art museum atop a queer pedestal, and you’ll encounter the inviting billboard for “Queer Lens.” Reproduced is a publicity image by Frederick Spalding, a self-taught British portrait photographer. Fanny and Stella, middle-class lovelies in hoop skirts, engage in a warm embrace. The couple, otherwise known as Thomas Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park, appeared on the London stage — and often out and about in public — in snazzy women’s attire.
The photograph dates from about 1870. Today, when drag queens and trans people, especially women, are innocent targets of hysterical conservative attacks as some new liberal phenomenon signaling imminent social collapse, a 155-year-old photograph casts a witty and jaundiced eye on the stubbornness of irrational anti-queer hate. Good on the Getty for not mincing visual words.
Getty curator Paul Martineau has organized “Queer Lens” in nine chronological sections. (His catalog, compiled with historian Ryan Linkof, is very good.) Each one is pegged to social conditions around LGBTQ+ life, principally in the United States and Europe.
“The Pansy Craze,” for example, takes note of pre-Prohibition-era underground clubs, often gay, where drag and other performers gained local fame, in addition to bohemian European establishments, some with a vibrant public face. Show business is prominent in Baron Adolph de Meyer’s atmospheric portraits of entertainer (and later spy) Josephine Baker and Carl Van Vechten’s Bessie Smith, empress of the blues, resplendent behind a huge, feathered fan. Buoyant members of a Harlem social club of drag kings and queens posed for James Van Der Zee, while Brassaï cast his quietly voyeuristic eye on a relaxed and tender lesbian couple enjoying a Paris nightclub. Artist and designer Cecil Beaton performed a coy fashion magazine pose in full drag, his slender form crowned by an enormous picture hat that transforms him into something approaching a human flower, photographed by the duo David James Scott and Edgar Wilkinson.
Such portraits create a surprisingly revealing context for Surrealist Man Ray’s “Rrose Sélavy,” the famous photographs of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp in drag, bundled up in a cloche hat and fur-collared coat, eyeliner carefully smudged and lip gloss crisp. Two straight male artists are scrambling establishment gender, but here it’s less a singular statement than part of a larger cultural phenomenon.
Art and science are analytical tools in some photographs, especially those of nudes. (The show includes considerable nudity, mostly male.) Two images from about 1860 are early textbook cases.
In one, photography pioneer Félix Nadar pictured an intersex person from the neck down. Careful cropping maintains privacy for clinical study.
In the other, Gaudenzio Marconi helped to launch what would become a standard trope over a century’s time for using an artistic pedigree to legitimize homoerotic images. With a flesh-and-blood male model, his picture replicates the famous, much-admired Hellenistic marble sculpture known as the “Barberini Faun,” a muscled god with splayed legs, dredged up during the Renaissance from a moat below Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo.
Strict gender separation common to early 19th century social structures underwent unexpected transformation after the binaries of heterosexual and homosexual were invented in 1869. Karl Maria Kertbeny, an apparently closeted Hungarian journalist who was living in Berlin, coined the two terms barely a generation after the camera’s 1839 invention.
The show’s first image is even earlier. A small cut-paper silhouette from 1810 shows Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant gazing into each other’s eyes, their profiles framed in entwined strands of their hair. The artist is unknown. But silhouettes like this are evoked by the phrase “the art of fixing a shadow,” which is how William Henry Fox Talbot described his earthshaking invention of the negative-positive process that made photographs possible. The lesbian silhouette’s inclusion reminds that same-sex love predates cameras and the modern era, while implying that things were about to change.
And change they have, for good and ill. These days, the Getty is probably the only major art museum in America that could open an exhibition like “Queer Lens.” Others wouldn’t dare.
Some smaller institutions would, like the young Chicago exhibition space Wrightwood 659, where the large international loan exhibition “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” is currently on view. (Curator Jonathan D. Katz, a respected scholar, has said that four out of five of his requests to museums and private collectors for loans to the show were denied, and no American museum would accept the show for a tour, even when offered for free.) Meanwhile across town, the mainstream Art Institute of Chicago is about to unveil “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World,” a traveling exhibition virtually identical to the one already seen in Paris and Los Angeles, where it was notably titled “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.”
The show explores the late-19th century artist’s homosocial themes, distinctive for Impressionism, whose common human subjects were typically women and girls. A spokesperson at the Art Institute of Chicago says the name change, made long before the show’s Paris debut, is simply meant to reflect “Caillebotte’s full lived experience and daily life.” Maybe, but all three prior Caillebotte retrospectives at American museums since 1976 have already done that. In the current repressive climate, the explanation is frankly unconvincing.
The Getty has the prestige and immense financial resources to ignore thuggish political attacks on queer people — and on the arts — which now gush from various statehouses and, most dangerously, Washington’s halls of government. An absurd, now notorious New York Times front-page story in 2016 claiming presidential candidate Donald Trump would be “the most gay-friendly Republican nominee for president ever” has been disproved by what is widely considered to be the most vicious such administration in American history.
It surpasses even the 1980s Reagan administration, recalled in “$3 Bill,” a companion Getty Research Institute show also on view. A furious 1987 Donald Moffett poster, dedicated to Gay Men’s Health Crisis Director Diego Lopez, juxtaposes the AIDS-indifferent Hollywood president, smirking vapidly above the phrase, “He kills me,” next to a screaming orange bull’s-eye. “$3 Bill” is a rather jumbled amalgam of minor artworks, documents (books, fliers, pamphlets, magazines, etc.) and ephemera assembled by GRI curator Pietro Rigolo, meant to compile evidence of contemporary queer lives. Its most affecting moments reference the AIDS epidemic’s abject cruelty.
Powerful forces of oppression are of course still at play. The day after “Queer Lens” opened, the Supreme Court ruled that individual states may ban healthcare for minors based on the identity of the patient asking for it: cisgender, yes; transgender, no — parents and doctors be damned. The blatantly bigoted decision will someday be overturned, but not without inflicting enormous pain in the interim.
A few features of “Queer Lens” are surprising. A lone film projection — Andy Warhol’s short movie “Blow Job,” in which an actor’s face performs the role of fellatio recipient — seems out of place, when many other queer films could as easily be included. In fact, like Marconi using the classical Barberini faun sculpture as a high-art pretense to legitimize ogling male nudity in a photograph, Warhol used ink and acrylic paint as “makeup” to legitimize the mass media photographs he appropriated for paintings. Since almost all of Warhol’s classic 1960s silk-screen works are best described as photographs in painting drag, including one would have been splendid.
Omissions are inevitable. (The show makes no claim to being encyclopedic.) Luis Medina, who chronicled Chicago’s queer scene in the 1970s, and Jeff Burton, who photographed the almost surreal margins of the huge 1990s pornography industry in the suburban San Fernando Valley, are especially missed.
Through no fault of its own, “Queer Lens” peters out a bit at the end, when the final section declares “The Future Is Queer” in 18 works from the last decade. (Happily, two-thirds are from Getty’s own collection.) The world got along for thousands of years without the enforced binaries of heterosexual and homosexual, and in recent decades the fences erected around that century-old split have been coming down. The simultaneous 21st century digital revolution is dramatically changing the contextual terms of the image game, as surely as the analog camera did after 1839.
Given that a digital camera is now in most every pocket, queer photography’s bracing fusion of the personal and the exotic is pretty threadbare, since exoticism no longer applies to being queer in American life. It simply is what it is. We can be grateful for the shift. And we can also be grateful pictures will continue to shape and affirm queer existence, as pictures always have the capacity to do.
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