For Your Pleasure: 15 Years of DuoVision opened at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool at the end of January, featuring the work of Marc Vallée. The exhibition features photography exploring the alternative queer club scene in the 1990s in the UK. The exhibition is led by the guest curatorial partners DuoVision, composed of Martin Green and James Lawler. Green ran Smashing, a popular London queer club night in the 1990s, and is also a DJ, while Lawler was a regular figure in the Liverpool and London club scene.
The show features prints of both domestic and communal queer spaces, from Marc Vallée portraits of friends from art school at home and Donald Milne’s iconic band pictures of Jarvis Cocker, Pulp and Menswear, to Jon Shard’s and David Swindells’ photo documentary work of Smashing in London and Flesh at the legendary Hacienda in Manchester.
Vallée, in particular, is a well known British documentary photographer who was part of the London queer club scene in the 90s when he was an art student. While he never brought his camera to the clubs, the friends he made on the dance floor are also the subject of his photographs featured in For Your Pleasure. Vallée is well-known not just for his zines and photobooks on youth culture, that are held in multiple museum collections around the world including Tate Britain, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, but also for his photojournalism work documenting political protest.
I sat down with Vallée and we talked about the importance of documenting queer homes and domestic spaces, zines and photobooks as archives, intimacy and ethics, as well as reaching out to and collaborating with younger generations reclaiming zines as spaces for art and documentation. For Your Pleasure is on at the Open Eye Gallery up until March 9, 2025.
Would you mind introducing yourself however you feel comfortable?
My name is Marc Vallée, and I’m from London. I’m a documentary photographer, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I’m particularly interested in youth culture, male youth culture, queer youth, graffiti writers, skateboarders, sex workers. It's been a variety of documentary projects over the years. Plus the main destination for my work is zines and photobooks but also exhibitions.
You focus on communities historically living on the margins from queer young people, sex workers, skateboarders to graffiti writers. Why do you focus on these communities and what is your relationship with them?
The bottom line is it’s partly autobiographical but it is also documentary, so it fits into the traditions of documentary photography, how you document your subject and the ethics around that. In the beginning with the 90s work, it was incredibly autobiographical. Later it became a little more academic, traditional, with documenting political dissent and riots for a period, with strong, ethical rules. I spent a year documenting a young London graffiti crew, and I did that in a very classical documentary way, but then we became friends. And then we did other stuff in other cities, Paris for instance, it was more collaborative in a sense but they were definitely not performing for me. But we’re on such a level of intimacy and understanding, I kind of knew what they were going to do before they did it, and I would photograph it.
In previous interviews, you’ve mentioned that you were also a part of queer club spaces, that this is where you met fellow art students Darian, Adrian, and others featured in your photographs as a young gay art student in the 1990s now on show in For Your Pleasure. How did being close in age and experience shape the dynamic between yourselves?
I was a few years older than them, but fundamentally, it didn't make any difference, in terms of making pictures, we were at the same art school, going to the same bars and clubs. Saying that, I think our experiences were a bit different, because I was just a little bit older, and I came out when I was 15 in the 1980s.
When I viewed your work, I was immediately struck by how you capture intimacy, this vulnerability and strength of your friends in the photographs. How do you do this so effectively? How did photographing your friends affect your relationships? Are you still in contact with these individuals?
I’m glad the pictures show intimacy and that you can see that. I can't overstate how much I care about these pictures. I think the context of when the pictures were made is important. We were young, making art, collaborating and partying together and navigating 90s London. I'm still friends with Jamie [Atherton], he is an artist in his own right, he wrote a beautiful and sensitive foreword for my zine When I was at Art School in the 90s that was published in 2020. Unfortunately, for the rest, we have lost contact, which is probably the nature of things with work made so long ago.
Why did you choose to photograph your friends in their homes, as opposed to these club scenes? Other photographers featured in the exhibition – Jon Shard and David Swindells for example – took pictures of the community in the clubs. Did you ever take photos of your friends in the club or only in their homes?
At some point, I made the decision to do it in their homes. I honestly can’t remember why I did that. I could have done it in the photography studio at university, but I’m glad I did not do that. The domestic space, especially when it’s young people, bedrooms, objects, in a shared house, adds a huge amount of information about the boys. I love these pictures, and I’m really glad I made them in that context. What David and Jon did with documenting the clubs was vital, to have a record of these club nights, the people from that time, is hugely significant. Walking around the room in the gallery with their work is a powerful experience, a truly immersive experience.
One of my favourite parts of your work in For Your Pleasure is your exploration of queer domesticity. Most recently, I enjoyed the exhibition Dreaming of Home about queer homecomings, as well as more localised efforts about queer domesticity like Instagram accounts Queer Dish Racks, and Queer Bedside Tables, which shares photos of queer people’s dishracks. It’s something small but universal that connects communities. Both projects highlight the precarity of living and surviving as a queer person today. What can photographs of queer young people reveal about queer lives?
Adrian is the only one who was not at art school, he worked at a queer indie bar that was very much part of the scene. He lived in a shared house with two sisters, I think their parents owned the house. The living room was quite eclectic. It had all these pages from fashion magazines above him, and Adrian is sitting there with a cigarette reading. And of course, I used to fancy him immensely, we had been clubbing the night before at Popstarz and I had crashed over with the plan to make pictures the next day. We both had hangovers and were a bit worse for wear.
You speak to the idea of recording queer culture and community for the future – capturing details about queer life in these views of Darian and Adrian’s bedrooms, even if your intention then was not to preserve it for history. Do you see your art as archival, and how do you hope it lives on?
I think most artists would like their art to be around in the future. The fact that the zines and photobooks are in museum collections is useful for historians, researchers, or whoever comes along and wants to research that period or subject, they can hold physical printed objects, so yeah I think that kind of archiving is important. I also think knowing and understanding our own history is vital. That was not my original motivation when making the work. It was contemporary, I was documenting the here and now. Saying that, having that work contextualised in an exhibition like this is a powerful statement from the gallery and contributes to our collective queer history. For example, I got a text from one of the curators this morning, and they told me 50 students were in the gallery looking at the work and 50 more were waiting outside to get in.
In the past ten years, creating zines and photobooks have exploded as ways to document queer communities, as well as efforts of museums to collect zines, like the Queer Zine Archive Project. Why is it important to share your art through zines and photo books, especially through a medium that has historically been used for community organising?
For me it’s about the destination of the image. I actually do a lecture, a talk on this, at different universities, called From Zine to Museum Wall. I use my Vandals in the City zine, it’s the one of graffiti writers I spent a year with. The original destination of those pictures was a self-published zine. I pointed out to the guys at the time that the pictures could go anywhere, and I think they were, like “yeah, whatever.” After the zine was published, the work was included in a major exhibition at the Museum of London called London Nights and the images were used for the posters you could buy from the gift shop as well as on the London tube walls to advertise the exhibition, huge posters that millions of people saw across the tube network. It went from zine to the museum wall and then tube wall. If I hadn't made the zine in the first place, none of that would have happened.
I do like the physical object, but that’s probably the Gen X in me. I come from a layout and typesetting background before I went to art school and I enjoyed printing my own prints back then. I see a lot of young queer people making zines today which is wonderful.
I do like the physical object, but that’s probably the Gen X in me. I come from a layout and typesetting background before I went to art school and I enjoyed printing my own prints back then. I see a lot of young queer people making zines today which is wonderful.
And one final question about your own perspective: how did or does your experience of growing up in the 1980s in the UK, during the height of the AIDS pandemic, inform your photography, and who you’ve chosen as your focus?
As a young gay man growing up in 80s Britain, Margaret Thatcher, government backed homophobia and the whole AIDS pandemic, seeing friends and boyfriends die, and all the politics around that. Getting into art school in the 90s, working through all of that and making art, it became quite natural that I ended up photographing my new friends from art school and the London indie gay club scene.
It was not, oh, I must document the marginalised gay community, it was, these are the people I care about, desire, and I’m documenting them because I want to document them. It was like breathing, I had to do it.
I think that’s a really good starting place to make art. In a way, making that work was a celebration of their existence in a hostile world.
It was not, oh, I must document the marginalised gay community, it was, these are the people I care about, desire, and I’m documenting them because I want to document them. It was like breathing, I had to do it.
I think that’s a really good starting place to make art. In a way, making that work was a celebration of their existence in a hostile world.
What do you hope people walk away with from the exhibition?
That's such a difficult question, and so subjective. It probably depends on who the person is, where they're coming from and how they approach the work. If they are a Gen Z student researching 90s fashion or queer history then I think they're going to get a lot out of it. If it's someone from my generation or older I hope they can connect to it in a way that means something special to them. I showed this work in Berlin last summer and on the opening night someone came up to me and told me they had dated one of the boys in the pictures. You really never know who's walking into the gallery. Saying that, I just hope the work resonates with people, not just mine, but all the photographers.
