“After taking this image, I knew I was onto something that had never been seen before.” – Robert Andy Coombs
To celebrate Pride Month, we’re spotlighting LGBTQ+ photography projects from photographers around the world. In this collection, Robert Andy Coombs creates intimate portraits with friends and lovers. Naima Green pays homage to Catherine Opie while celebrating queer communities built by women of color. Soraya Zaman travels the US, making portraits of Transmasculine people from all walks of life.
After sustaining an injury to his spinal cord in college, Robert Andy Coombs searched for representations that resonated with his experiences. “I felt so uninformed from my medical professionals about disability and sexuality that I had to find it elsewhere,” he remembers.
“There were very few resources to learn from, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and started creating images I wanted to see in the world.” The result is CripFag—- reclamation of the words “crip” and “fag” as well as a tender exploration of sex, love, and friendship.
“In a world where binaries are heavily enforced and rigidly policed, Soraya Zaman sees their subjects as they are, establishing a profound level of trust with their subjects who reveal their deep, inner selves in a series of portraits and personal quotes, which, when taken together offer a multi-faceted look at our ideas around masculinity in America today.” – Miss Rosen
While working on her MFA thesis, All the black language, at the New York Public Library in 2017, Naima Green came upon Catherine Opie’s Dyke Deck, a set of poker cards that playfully looks into the lives and performances of ‘90s lesbians in the Bay Area.
“The deck felt both new and old, still radical and iconic. I knew it would find a place in my own work as I wanted to add to the ethos of queer cultures,” Green writes. With Opie’s blessing, Green reimages the Dyke Deck for the modern day as Pur·suit — a vital celebration of queer, trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming communities for women of color:
“After 23 years, I didn’t fully see myself or my community in Opie’s deck. I found so much pleasure parsing through her work and thinking about which of my friends might identify with what characters if any. I knew I needed to make a Brooklyn version that reflected my people.”
“For the majority of my life, I was unsure where I belonged in the world. I grew up in a religious household in a small Southern town. My mother was raised in the Sanctified Holy Church and my father was raised Southern Baptist. As a result of the strict beliefs I had been taught since birth, I did not feel comfortable coming out as queer until I was 21 years old.
“As I came to terms with my own identity, the photo series ‘Infinite Tenderness’ came to fruition. In 2016, I began exploring the notion of intimacy and identity among the LGBTQ+ community in the American South. These are the people I have met and connected with along the way. “Through this work, I have documented the exploration of one’s body, sexuality, and gender that comes along with growing up and identifying oneself.” – Peyton Fulford
About thirteen years ago, the photographer and scholar Leah DeVun and her partner, who is transgender, lived in Texas. “Much like now, there was a lot of anti-LGBT rhetoric in the air,” she tells me. They were looking for safe, protected places to stay while traveling when a friend recommended womyn’s lands—historic and revolutionary communities built by lesbians in the 1970s and ’80s.
Lesbian Land, DeVun’s ongoing series, brings together documentary photographs from the womyn’s lands of today and staged performances inspired by images made on womyn’s lands in the 1970s and ’80s.
Tom Atwood defines the heroes of Kings and Queens of Their Castles as people who “sing” to him, and he spent fifteen years tracking them across the United States. The book is the result of literally thousands upon thousands of hours of work spent researching, contacting, visiting, and photographing hundreds of LGBTQ people at home. Many of them are celebrities- performers, activists, writers, artists- and many of them are not- farmers, sheriffs, doctors, scientists, bartenders. All of them live in castles of their own making.
“I wanted to highlight trans and non-binary figures that have existed on the African continent and that lived within their communities without suffering in any way socially to show people that they have always existed and are therefore deserving of the same respect and place in society as everyone else.
“All of the subjects who took part in this project are part of the queer community in some way so having them embody queer figures of the past added another dimension and thread connecting the experiences of non-binary and trans folks from the past on the African continent in their particular communities, to those of today living as part of the African diaspora in a more globalized world.” – Yannis Guibinga
Looking for more LGBTQ+ photography? Check out this collection as well.
