At a glance
Queer intimacy, leather culture and chosen family emerge from photographs made before these communities had much visibility — or protection.
Why go
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Artlovers Tip
Don’t read these images only as documents of a past subculture. Look at them as evidence of people creating visibility for themselves before the wider culture was ready to recognise them. A small but important London exhibition: historically rich, emotionally direct and highly relevant to current conversations around gender, representation and LGBTQ+ visibility.
Artlovers relevance
Inside the exhibition
Meet the artist
Description
Sensual / Mutual looks back at Del LaGrace Volcano’s formative years, when photography became a way of documenting communities that were actively inventing new ways of living, loving and representing themselves. The works are historically important because they were made from inside these communities rather than by an external observer. Desire, friendship, sexuality and self-fashioning appear alongside the social pressures surrounding queer life in the decades after Stonewall and during the AIDS crisis.
The exhibition also resists treating queer history only through trauma. Its title points toward mutuality, sensuality and collective survival, showing joy and intimacy as forms of resistance as much as documentation.
