Cruising for Another Picture

P: “What do you take pictures of?”

J: “Something. Anything. Anyone that takes me to the feeling.”

P: “What feeling?”

J: “The feeling of not hiding. The hiding, it doesn’t make it go away.”

Bound. Caged.

Locked.

It begins with enslavement. Ruled by sexuality. We live as though we are about to be found out. At any and at every moment. We are made aware. Forged to conceal. Prey versus predator. Consciously thinking through the gaze. Don’t look too long. Don’t make it obvious. Don’t not look, because that’s just queer.

Secret observations. Discreet movements.

Stealth.

Like others, it began for me with photographs. Not fine art or high fashion. A practical, regular, everyday kind of photography. Being pulled around the C&A clothing store as a boy, sluggish and non-compliant to my mother’s march. Then I saw. Columns of erected pillars made from pants, trunks, briefs, and boxers. The underwear section changed everything. Decapitated torsos of Olympic deity. Furrows and grooves, warrior limbs, framing crisp white briefs full and round. Blood rushed to my cheeks. Like a switch gone off, this vision clicked me on. Alarms rang as these tightly cropped, tighter cupped, sightless images stared back row after row, one behind the other. Flashing at me. I could do nothing but look. I was alight. Ablaze. The bravest moment my childhood saw was the laying my hands upon it. Grazing my fingers between the package and the fabric of the garment. The card was cool, smooth, and dry. The fabric soft and pliant. I was fire. Instinct pulled me out. Retreat. At that moment I knew, and everything changed.

Gay photographs. Photographs that are gay. What does it mean? Is it the object, content, or viewer that decrees a homo classification? They are a performance. They are a truth set within lies. The carvings on the face, the length of the body, the roundness of their freedom. Von Gloeden, Day, and Lynes gave us mythic beauty. Transportation to a place and time where joyous fear could spill over, unroll, pool, coalesce. Tobias, McKnight, and Hetz are visceral, wet, earthly bondages to the depths of the gaze. The body is real. Flesh with hair and fat and muscle. Youth and age. Love and lust. It is given and revered. Snapped, saved, and shared.

Time moves forward. Bodies repeat, multiply, and grow. The photographs are familiar. They are new. Show me more. Less is more but never enough. We create, we show, we endure. The thickness of the thoughts, they grow as we look, and we imagine. We imagine the touch. We imagine the act. We imagine the life. The Word of Gay is visual. It speaks to us through the image of man. The blood and the rush. The image of gay is our persecutor and our liberator. The feeling locks in as the world keeps turning.

The fear of being seen, exposed. It companions us for much of our bullshit adolescence. We act our way through, perform for them, him, and her. This was my experience, and it was his experience. It is now their experience. Now, I am uncloaked. I am getting it right, and it feels good. Making work that is gay, is that possible? The photographs I make are no longer queer to me. They are mine and they came from us. Photographer and participant.

Partnership.

To one who doesn’t feel as I feel, queerly observed. You make us different out of your own sameness. The gays are good, they are conceived and known. Still, we remain apart. Liberated prey, cattle but not for slaughter.

The print needs to embody. The captured faces stripped on negatives, illuminated by pixels. They should look back, recognition sparks. The body should concede, ignite the soul. I look to feel. I take to move. Animated by making. Ploughing a path through ubiquity, sowing seeds that reveal. If the feeling doesn’t come, I am lost. Inert. Hidden.

Only when I feel am I seen.

Only when I see do I feel.

Referenced Photographers:

Wilhelm von Gloeden – Frederick Holland Day – George Platt Lynes – Herbert Tobias –

Mark McKnight – Florian Hetz – John Post

Looking at Ollie

What incredible luck we have, to have our photographs. 

I write this less than twenty-four hours after the death of one of my great loves.

I am in a mixed state of both shock and grief; devastated by the presence of his absence.

As I lay in bed last night, held awake from my fatigue, I scrolled aimlessly through the galleries on my phone. Looking at pictures that I remembered taking and rediscovering others that I had forgotten about. I needed to see this face that I loved, and I hopelessly wanted the gaze of that face to block the pain of my grief.

This looking really was anything but aimless.

Whether existing as physical printed objects or as digital footprints in our everyday hardware, a photographs potency transforms itself in times of loss. We look upon them as markers of our lives together, a confirmation of our time shared. Seldom thinking about this role photography plays at the time of capturing these moments.

As a photographer I often make pictures with intent. I understand what the concept is and the context where they will inhabit; I curate their purpose and formation. However, like so many of us, I also take photographs carelessly, without thought or reason. The latter method far outweighs the scale of the prior, although at their time of making have a diminished importance, hidden amongst their abundance. Yet I took them and saved them, as though somehow knowing I would need them one day. Now that I have them and not him, they are a treasure to me that they once weren’t.

When making such pictures we become collectors. We consciously, and sometimes subconsciously, pick and choose what we consider notable, what moments are worth collecting. Yet today with the mediums great accessibility we collect such vast numbers of moments that we forget that we have many of them in our possession. Photography’s current stasis of disposability is a blessing and not a dilution of the art form, as many might think. I feel blessed to have the ability to look and to feel backwards, to spend time with pictures that may not hold artistic value or merit but contain precious sentiment and feeling, priceless moments in time frozen within a frame.

Photography in this context is medicinal. Like the jab of a vaccine, the ‘prick’ of looking, as Roland Barthes famously wrote, will hurt. Gradually a healing occurs and that once jarring prick becomes a welcome infusion of warmth and memory. The looking no longer hurts but replenishes.

I can feel it happening now. The more that I look upon them the more I remember the love and the joy that he gave me. I remember our first meeting. I remember how he learned to trust me, and how, for me, it was truly love at first sight. I look and I remember how he made me laugh and worry, how he comforted and annoyed.

It seems an obvious thing, and something that isn’t new when considering the effects photography has on our lives, but my grief, like countless with me, seeks out keys to my memory that no other medium in art or literature can easily unlock, only a photograph carries this power.

The progress of time may dull our grief, but the memory of our past allows us to live forwards.

I am thankful to be a careless picture collector, and grateful that I can look.

a narrative

Although an important part of the history of photography, and one that I enjoy immensely as both spectator and creator, being a photographer isn't just about creating the beautiful, grand or the sublime pictures that we like to hang on our walls. It is also about producing work that has something to say; telling a story and creating a point of view.

I asked my mum to pull out old family pictures of myself as a child for a potential project I am developing. I wasn't sure what to expect from these old snapshots, I hadn’t seen many of them in over a decade. Many were very typical family snaps, pictures of me at occasions which mark the years passing; Christmases birthdays, special occasions which warranted the camera to come out of its box. However, a few photos really jumped out at me and I was struck by how cohesive some of the pictures were and what they could say beyond being family snaps.

Author at Menzieshill, Dundee (1987?)

I have no memory of these three pictures of me at a park taken some time in the 1980s, and I can't say I even recognise the boy as myself; I must only be around 3 years old. They do, however, stir up strong nostalgic feelings of my childhood. This is the power of photography; the power of reflection. There is another power at play here, that of recording a moment. What drove my parents to take these images on what appears to be a very non-eventful day? Why do we have this need to take and then save pictures of each other? Most obviously the answer here is love and a desire to be able to look back at the love we have for each other, and I am sure many parents will agree to this statement. My parents have no real interest in photography or at the time any technical skill or expensive camera with fancy buttons, but on this day they have inadvertently created a successful series of images that not only illustrate my physical surroundings of the place and time, but also an illustration of the emotions that I would often feel as a child growing up; that of being introverted, thoughtful and at times a little lonely. This loneliness did not stem from a physical lack of people, I was rarely alone, constantly surrounded by my siblings and parents; which is illustrated by the watchful shadow of my mother in one of the frames. However, my inability to understand myself growing up, which was mostly related to my sexuality, did make it difficult for me at times to put myself more "out there" outside of my family unit. These three images illustrate this aspect of my growth throughout my childhood to me, to an outside observer they may say something else. Each of us has our own narrative which wholly influences our interpretation of an image, and that is fine, in fact it is the way it should be. Photographs are more than recordings, they are sparks that ignite strands of our memories and allow us to reflect on not only ourselves but help us to interpret the world around us.

I am happy I came across these and very happy that they were taken. This surprising nature of photographs is why I love photography.

Photo Credit: Mum