It makes sense that this is happening at the Getty Museum. With a long tradition of looking closely, naming patterns, and capturing and archiving almost every key moment in recent history through photography, this new exhibition opens a lens not just on queerness but on photography’s ability to record lives that often had to be hidden in plain sight. Queer Lens: A History of Photography spans from June 17 to September 28, offering a rare and layered look at queer history through over 270 vintage prints, personal ephemera, books, and zines, becoming the first major exhibition in the U.S. to survey photography explicitly through a queer perspective.
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.

Gay Liberation March on Times Square, 1969 Diana Davies - Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations © NYPL

Untitled, 1927 James Van Der Zee - Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company, FA 97.177 © James Van Der Zee Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Image courtesy Henry

Colette, Writer, 1930 André Kertész - Getty Museum © Estate of André Kertész

Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, Curator; Photographer, 1974 - Gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © International Center of Photography and Francesco Scavullo Trust Beneficiaries

Jose in Front of Laundromat, Lynwood, CA, from the series Queer Brown Ranchero, 2017 - Getty Museum © Fabian Guerrero

Diesel Jeans, Victory Day, 1945, 1994 David LaChapelle - Getty Museum © David LaChapelle

Mattachine Society “Sip-In” Julius’ Bar, New York, NY, 1966; printed later - Fred W. McDarrah - Getty Museum © Fred W. McDarrah / MUUS Collection