Queer portraits and the importance of visibility is explored through a selection of photobooks and monographs:
Alvin Baltrop : the piers / edited by James Reid & Tom Watt ; foreword by Glenn O'Brien
7 BALT ALV
2015
Powerful, lyrical and controversial, Alvin Baltrop's photographs are a groundbreaking exploration of clandestine gay culture in New York in the 1970s and 80s. During that era, the derelict warehouses beneath Manhattan's West Side piers became a lawless, forgotten part of the city that played host to gay cruising, drug smuggling, prostitution and suicides. Baltrop documented this scene, unflinchingly and obsessively capturing everything from fleeting naked figures in mangled architectural environments to scenes of explicit sex and police raids on the piers.
Argentine, Mexican and Guatemalan photography: feminist, queer, and post-masculinist perspectives/ David William Foster
(8)77.071-055.34 FOS
2014
David William Foster's study provides critical perspectives on the ways in which transgressive themes of gender and sexual identity are made visible through diverse photographic displays of male and female bodies. This book offers one of the first in-depth investigations of the complex and extensive history of gendered perspectives in Latin American photography through studies of works in Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala
Assume nothing / Rebecca Swan
7 SWAN REB
2010
Frank images of twenty-five people ranging in age from twenty to sixty from countries around the world explore the meaning of gender and includes the participants' candid comments on what it has meant to live outside of traditional gender identities. The participants are Haitian, Samoan, Maori, European, Koori/Aboriginal, and African people living in America, New Zealand, Australia, and England. They are gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, and pansexual. They live as transsexuals, gender queers, eunuchs, sister girls, drag kings and queens, and the alternative gender roles traditional to Maori and Samoan cultures.
Black male/white male
7 ROTI FAN
1988
Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s first published photobook. A collection of photographs comprised of intimate portraits made in the early to the mid-1980s, including an image of American writer Essex Hemphill, and accompanied by text by Hirst. The photographs explored formal aesthetics of color photography in a dynamic manner and also challenged stereotypical views on race, interracial relationships and sexuality.
Changing difference: queer politics and shifting identities
I-MOD-GAL (Galeria Civica, Modena)
2012
The exhibition Changing Difference and the accompanying publication aim to explore the work of three seminal New York based artists, image-makers and underground cultural agents who have greatly contributed to the redefinition of male representation, each declining and shaping aspects of queer identity between the '60s and late '80s in America
Dagger: on butch women
305 DAG
1994
A collection of writings, interviews, photographs, and artists celebrating lesbian culture. Featuring Pat Califia, Carol A. Queen, Susie Bright, Jeanne Cordova, JoAnn Loulan, S Diane A. Bogus, Donna Minkowitz, Cherry Smyth, Achy Obejas, Julie Tolentino, Jenni Olson, Jackie Weltman, Diane diMassa, Andrea Nata lie, Joan Hilty, Trina Robbins.
Daniel Schumann: international orange
7 SCHU SCH
2013
In his book project, International Orange, Daniel Schumann portrays same-sex families and couples in San Francisco. This work originated from his desire to express his experience of this diverse and liberal city and at the same time to examine the theme of family from a new perspective
Delhi : communities of belonging / Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh.
(540)7.041-055.34 GUP
2016
Delhi offers a stunning series of more than 150 full-color documentary photographs and companion first-person texts, which together offer an unprecedented portrait of LGBTQ people’s lives in India today. Focusing on Delhi, noted photographers Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh chronicle the halting emergence of networks of men and women living under the shadow of stigma and criminalized behavior—in a country where anti-sodomy laws dating back to the British Empire were recently struck down, only to be reaffirmed in a surging wave of homophobia. The photographs in this lavishly presented volume reflect the photographers’ celebrated capacity for entering into lives rarely seen. In Delhi, we are invited into the daily routines, work, homes, and intimate lives of subjects from different backgrounds—from urban professionals to day laborers. A visually arresting document in its own right, Delhi presents American readers with a starting point for understanding the profound struggles for recognition by India’s LGBTQ community
Eye to eye : portraits of lesbians / J.E.B.
7 JEB EYE
1979
Seminal photobook by artist J.E.B features portraits of lesbians in the 1970s.
Femmes of power / Del La Grace
77.041-055.34 VOL
2008
What is a femme? Going beyond identity politics and the pleasure of plumage, 'Femmes of Power' captures a diverse range of queerly feminine subjects whose powerful and intentional redress explodes the meaning of femme for the 21st century
The gay essay / Anthony Friedkin
FRIEDK
2014
During the culturally tumultuous years of 1969 and 1970, Friedkin made a series of photographs that together offer an eloquent and expressive visual chronicle of the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. This is the first book to explore the series, titled The Gay Essay, in depth within the broader historical context that gave rise to it. 1969 witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York City and was a turning point in the history of community building and organized political activism among homosexuals in the
United States.
Gay Gotham: art and underground culture in New York City.
USA-NEW-MUS
2016
This book brings to life the countercultural artistic communities that sprang up in New York over the last hundred years. A creative class whose radical ideas would determine much of modern culture. More than 200 images illuminate their personal bonds, scandal-provoking secrets at the time and many largely unknown to the public since. Starting with the bohemian era of the 1910s and 1920s, when the pansy craze drew voyeurs of all types to Greenwich Village and Harlem, the book winds through midcentury Broadway as well as Fire Island as it emerged as a hotbed, turns to the post-Stonewall, decade-long wild party that revolved around clubs like the Mineshaft and Studio 54, and continues all the way through the activist mobilization spurred by the AIDS crisis and the move toward acceptance at the century's close. By peeling back the overlapping layers of this cultural network that thrived despite its illicitness, this publication reveals a whole new side of the history of New York and celebrates the power of artistic collaboration to transcend oppression.
Intimacies / Tee Corinne
7 CORI TEE
2002
Intimacies covers the entire career of pro-sex feminist photographer Tee Corinne. Speaking about her work, Corinne says, If I became a 'visible and accessible lesbian artist' it is because of the images made to fill a perceived void, to fill these blank spaces where desire and questioning and transcendence converged, where my intellectual longings and seven years of university art training responded to the social and cultural forces set in motion in the 1960s
Jeans / Karlheinz Weinberger
7 WEIN WEI (OVERSIZE)
2011
Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006)...began his artistic career taking pictures of friends, lovers and of the people in the street. Some of his images were first published under the pseudonym of "Jim" in the Swiss gay magazine Der Kreis (The Circle)
Kings in their castles : photographs of queer men at home / Tom Atwood
7 ATWO TOM
2005
Kings in Their Castles, a collective portrait of the gay and queer urban community in America, offers a personal view of some of our leading artists, writers, filmmakers, composers, musicians, and designers
Lesbian photo album: the lives of seven lesbian feminists / Cathy Cade
7 CADE CAT
1987
Cathy Cade's photographs have been published since the early 1970s in feminist books and in newspapers such as Union Wage, Plexus and off our backs. This photobook documents the lives of seven lesbian feminists and includes personal anecdotes with candid photographs.
Legendary : inside the house ballroom scene / photographs by Gerard H. Gaskin ; with an introduction by Deborah Willis and an essay by Frank Roberts
7 GASK GER
2013
Gerard H Gaskin's radiant color and black and white photographs take us insude the culture of house balls, underground events where gay and transgender men and women, mostly African and Latino, come together to see and be seen. At balls, high-spirited late night pageants, members of particular 'houses' - the House of Blahnik, the House of Xtravaganza - 'walk' competing for trophies in categories based on costume, attitude, dance moves, and 'realness'."
Voguing and the house ballroom scene of New York 1989-92 / photographs by Chantal Regnault ; edited by Stuart Baker.
7 REGN CHA
2011
Photographer Chantal Regnault spent many years capturing the emergent underground gay ballroom scene in Harlem at the end of the 1980s, from where Voguing emerged. A riot of fashion, image, poly-sexuality and a radical subversion of style, sexuality and race is vividly captured in the hundreds of photographs in this book
El Muro = The wall / Eduardo Hernández Santos.
V 7 HERN HER (OVERSIZE)
2008
Eduardo Hernández Santos' El Muro is a composite chronicle of late-night life at Havana's utmost limit of the city: the seafront wall, popularly known as the Malec*n. El Muro is a significant visual source of constantly-thwarted gay nightlife in Havana, but above all it is a social document about the members of a historical underclass emerging from hiding to contest efforts to control their lifestyles, to proclaim their normality and their non-conformity
Particular voices: portraits of gay and lesbian writers
7 GIAR GIA
1997
In 1985, photographer Robert Giard set out to create an archive of portraits of gay and lesbian writers from across the United States. His intention was to present visible evidence of their presence in our culture, to attest to their particular voices. The result is the most extensive photographic record of the gay and lesbian literary community ever undertaken. This book contains 182 of the more than 500 portraits Giard has made. The collection underscores the diversity of the gay population and encompasses a broad range of literary genres: fiction, poetry, drama, personal narrative, history, criticism, and political/activist statements
The passionate camera: photography and bodies of desire
77.036”192/199” PAS
1998
The Passionate Camera assembles over fifty artists, scholars and critics to examine the relationship between photography and sexuality. The contributors consider many issues including the importance of reinterpreting historical works by known homosexual photographers, contemporary photography and sexual diversity, and the use and abuse of photographs of sexual subjects in current political campaigns and direct activism. The Passionate Camera features color and black and white illustrations of works by artists such as Ajamu, Catherine Opie, Lyle Ashton Harris, Yasumasa Morimura, John O'Reilly and Sunil Gupta.
Pierre Molinier / Jean Luc Mercier
7 MERC JEA
2010
Black and white erotic gay photography by artist Pierre Molinier
Red threads: the south Asian queer connection in photographs
(540)77.041-055.34 DES
2003
A collection of photographs by artists Poulomi Desai, and Parminder Sekhon which showcase portraits of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer members of the South Asian community
Rewilding / Cass Bird
7 BIRD CAS
2012
A collection of photographs taken of gender-ambiguous and genderqueer friends of the photographer. The images explore notions of gender framed within the landscape of Tennessee countryside.
Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: gender performance in photography
77.036 BLE (OVERSIZE)
1997
A classic study of photo-based artworks that question gender identity. In many of the works, photography's strong aura of realism and objectivity promotes a fantasy of total gender transformation. In other pieces, the photographic representation articulates an incongruity between the posing body and its assumed costume. Features work by Cecil Beaton, Brassa', Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hach, Man Ray, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Yasumasa Morimura, Catherine Opie, Lucas Samaras, Cindy Sherman, Inez van Lamsweerde and Andy Warhol.
Stolen glances: lesbians take photographs
77.041-055.34 STO
1991
A collation of the photographic and literary work surrounding the depiction of lesbian sexuality. Organized thematically, this book touches on such issues as race, class and sexuality in both America and the United Kingdom
Sunil Gupta: pictures from here
7 GUPT GUP
2003
Sunil Gupta’s autobiographical photographs, both political and intimate, address being a gay Indian man in Europe, living between cultures.
Sunil Gupta: queer
7 GUPT GUP
2011
Arguably India's best-known working photographer, Gupta is also a well-known artist, curator, and writer. For decades he has explored narratives of contemporary gay life in India and other parts of the world. This book features selections from each of Gupta's major series offering a comprehensive overview of his work up to date
Walter Pfeiffer: in love with beauty
7 PFEI PFE
2008
Key classic photographic publication by Pfeiffer. “In Love with Beauty" offers an unprecedented chronological overview of the legendary Walter Pfeiffer, spanning four decades of photographic eroticism and wit, classical serenity and ornamental playfulness, artifice and immediacy
Yantras of womanlove / Tee Corinne
7 CORI TEE
1982
Photobook by lesbian photographer Corinne Tee, featuring artistic photographic representations of lesbian relationships.
Zanele Muholi: faces and phases
7 MUHO ZAN
2014
In Faces and Phases 2006-14, Zanele Muholi embarks on a journey of visual activism to ensure black queer and transgender visibility. Despite South Africas progressive Constitution and twenty years of democracy, black lesbians and trans men remain the targets of brutal hate crimes and so-called corrective rapes. Taken over the past eight years, the more than 250 portraits in this book, accompanied by moving testimonies, present a compelling statement about the lives and struggles of these individuals. They also comprise an unprecedented and invaluable archive: marking, mapping and preserving an often invisible community for posterity.