Within LGBTQ communities, the camera has historically served several critical functions. Journalists, artists, amateurs, and activists have used photography to build and sustain social bonds by sharing private experience, recording and preserving history, and celebrating sexuality and gender identities constrained by dominant social mores and legal prohibition - in other words, revealing what might otherwise be hidden from sight. By contrast, the medium has been used critically, and with aggression, as an instrument of identification and derogation by heteronormative media outlets and forces of state power. This publication, issued alongside The Image Centre's Summer 2014 exhibition season on the occasion of WorldPride 2014 Toronto, explores significant aspects of photography's function within and without queer culture over the last seventy-five years.
Curators: Sophie Hackett and Gaelle Morel
Research Assistant: Sol Legault
The Image Centre, 2014