Queer Lens: A History of Photography

There’s no forced statement here, just the quiet power of the passage of time, progress and things slowly falling into place. Eight sections stretch across decades, pulling from early homosocial portraits to the more explicit turns of the Gay Liberation Movement and into the resilience of the AIDS era. Everything sits on photography’s shoulders: its ability to show, to disguise, and to create something intimate with the lightest touch. Images once taken in secrecy now hang on museum walls. Photo booths, family snapshots, and drag portraits all coexist and tell the same thing: this happened, and it’s been happening for a long time. “The exhibition explores how, despite multiple forms of discrimination, LGBTQ+ individuals have shaped art and culture in innumerable ways,” shared Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle, Director of the J. Paul Getty.

Some of the works carry a weight that doesn’t need explaining, sharing even the introduction of the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” by Hungarian journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny through a pamphlet in 1869. Others, like coded Polaroids or drag snapshots from the Pansy Craze, sit at the intersection of private joy and public danger. Photography becomes both protection and rebellion. In that sense, the act of showing these images now isn’t only historic; it’s generous and needed. It acknowledges the communities that made space for each other when institutions didn’t and the artists who documented what no one else cared to preserve.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of talks, performances, and workshops that extend its themes into the present. A companion book by Paul Martineau and Ryan Linkof deepens the curatorial thread, offering another way to move through the stories and images. Together, they form an expanded space, quiet, steady, and built to hold the weight of memory while watching how queer life, in all its forms, continues to shape what photography and life can be.