7 amazing photos that capture queer history – including this shot from 1900
Calling the Shots: A Queer History of Photography - featuring striking portraits of drag queen Divine, trans model April Ashley and many more - is out now
Drawing from the Victoria and Albert Museum‘s extensive collection, Calling the Shots is an arresting, newly-released hardback surveying the history of LGBTIQ+ photography from as far as the 19th century.
Authored by Zorian Clayton with Lydia Caston and Hana Kaluznick, it features the work of an array of photographers past and present from around the world, including Cecil Beaton, Zanele Muholi and Nan Goldin.
The above picture, by Alvin Langdon Coburn, shows fellow US photographer F. Holland Day striking a pose in the year 1900. Day, who was also a publisher, was known for his homoerotic portraits, and it is widely believed that he was gay.
The book also features a portrait of the late model and trans woman April Ashley, by Tim Walker, which once appeared on the cover of Attitude. The book’s own cover shows the cinematic photograph Pan, taken by James Bidgood in the late 1960s. Bidgood would go on to direct the queer classic film Pink Narcissus.
The book is broken down into six chapters: Icons, Staged, Body, Liberty, Making a Scene and Beyond the Frame, with work depicting famous figures and faces from queer history, as well as documenting activism, hard-won legal battles, nightlife, performance, and diverse queer communities, collectives and subcultures.
Here, we take a look at seven photos from the book.
First Swim after Rebirth, 2018 – by Marvel Harris
Presented by Art Fund
Marvel Harris (b.1995)
Inkjet print
30 x 45 cm
April Ashley, London, 2011 – by Tim Walker
Tim Walker (b.1970)
April Ashley, London, 2011
Inkjet print
23 × 18 cm
Gus Solomons, 1960 – by Harold Edgerton
Given by The Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation
Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of The Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation,1996, 1996-75-1
Harold Edgerton (1903–1990)
Gelatin silver print
51 × 41 cm
Untitled no. 20 from Christopher Street series, 1976 – by Sunil Gupta
Purchases funded by the Photographs Acquisition Group
Sunil Gupta (b.1953)
Untitled no. 20
from Christopher Street series, 1976
Gelatin silver prints
50.5 × 40.5 cm
Cecil Beaton, 1925 – by Dorothy Wilding
Given by Eileen Hose
Dorothy Wilding (1893–1976)
Gelatin silver print
31 × 24.5 cm
She Rockers, Shepherd’s Bush Green, London, 1988 – by Normski
Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund
© Normski
Normski (b.1966)
Chromogenic print
68 × 57 cm
Divine at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1976 – by Eddie Squires
