Calling The Shots: Queering the history of photography with the V&A

Where better to search for a history of queer visual culture than one of the oldest and largest collections of photography in the world? In a bid to find LGBTQIA+ representation in the V&A’s extensive archive, curator of prints Zorian Clayton, has been scouring the museum’s collection for queer traces and narratives for over a decade, slowly collating a catalogue of queer history in pictures.

Encompassing works by photographers ranging from Cecil Beaton and Julia Margaret Cameron to Zanele Muholi and Nan Goldin, the book has woven together lens-based practices and practitioners from across the globe in a display of image making from the mid-19th century to today. With an amalgamation of newly acquired images in the collection and old relics rediscovered in amongst the archives, the publication’s pages flip between a lesser known, emerging generation of photographers and the cornerstones of the canon, drawing parallels between pictures and practices years apart. The collection enclosed in Calling The Shots has been structured by thematic chapters titled by terms such as: Icons, Body and Staged, providing a deliberately non-linear and expansive view over more than a century of photography.

We spoke to Zorian about the ways in which the project has reshaped the V&A’s collection by recentring those that have traditionally been left out of photographic history, how queer people and places have somehow looked the same throughout time, and why it was important to create a book that fosters a feeling of intersectionality and unity amongst the often divisive use of labels separating gender identity and sexuality.

It’s Nice That (INT): How did your research for the book begin? What was the process of working with the museum’s photography collections like to bring the contents of Calling The Shots together?

Zorian Clayton (ZC): I’ve been working at the V&A for almost exactly 13 years now, and for pretty much all of that time I’ve been the co-chair of our LGBTQ working group, carrying out research into the V&A’s archives for any work by queer artists or – more generally – any queer representation. So, if I hadn’t been doing a lot of that scouring of the collection through a LGBTQ+ lens, it would have been a lot more challenging to bring together this book – which was commissioned officially in January 2022 and published by Thames & Hudson this month.

The photography collection, much like the prints collection at the V&A – which is what I’m really the curator of – is certainly one of the museums richest in terms of places where we are going to find those interesting narratives of queer people and queer traces. I’ve always been connected to this department, so I’ve been lucky to be able to get my hands on all the archival boxes and things for a long time to find this sort of material.

I think in the making of this book – which is the first LGBT+ specific book that the V&A have ever done – we have also changed and shaped the collection a lot by making new acquisitions. By figuring out exactly what we did have to collate into a publication, we also figured out what we don’t have and some of those gaps might be obvious, but some of them less so. Now we’re filling some of those gaps, and that’s probably, in many ways, the bigger legacy to this project; being able to add to the collection by acquiring more photographic work that documents or is authored by queer people and in turn reshaping it.

INT: I love Calling The Shots as a title for the collection. Can you tell us a bit about its significance?

ZC: An example that I love to use to illustrate the meaning behind the book’s title is a project by artist duo James Barrett and Robin Forster. They had a friend who worked in an AIDS hospital and let them break into the X-ray room one night for the two men to take erotic images with the machine – the series is of them basically having sex in the AIDS hospital. By doing so, these subjects reclaimed their image as gay men at the time. Instead of being othered or photographed by people not within their community, either in a street photography or photo journalistic way, or even medically, they were intent on taking back the narrative. When you look at queer work made by queer people like this, you can just feel the power and the authenticity in it. So the book’s title really is a nod to this idea of representation and who gets to tell whose story.

INT: That’s really powerful. Are there any other standout images, or photographers that felt particularly poignant to you amongst the book’s contents?

Z.C: At the same time as the book was commissioned, the art fund that I’d applied for gave me a separate amount of money to buy the work of trans and non binary artists who were practically non-existent in the V&A’s collection. One of the photographers I purchased work from for the collection and, consequently to feature in the book, was Marvel Harris, who’s a young trans masculine photographer from the Netherlands. He made this incredible photo book called Marvel, from which a photograph of his top surgery scars titled manhood appears at the start of the body section of the book.

This is the first proud representation of a body that resembles mine in the collection (to make it very personal to me) but when I buy this kind of work for the museum, I also gather it with the mind that our collection goes out into exhibitions all over the world, and I hope that these artists’ work will be picked up on through that. If people can access trans narratives, pride and joy, through our public collection, then that would be an amazing thing. So these images really meant a lot to me, and Marvel Harris is just a fantastic emerging artist!

INT: What do you hope readers take away from this view on the history of photography through a queer lens?

ZC: I think that something I gained from looking back through history via the collection and something I would want readers to take away from the book is that when we look back through history, and look at queer spaces, behaviours and appearances they really don’t look all that different. There is such a visual overlap. I think that’s what’s exciting about looking through photographic history, is sometimes you just see someone in a photograph, and you just know they were queer. If you’re an LGBT+ person, you can have this historic gaydar, even through a static image as well. Sometimes it’s so powerful.

The Henri Cartier Bresson photograph we have in the book is a great example of that. It’s called Alicante, and it’s a portrait of a queer looking person doing woman’s hair in the street. Henri Cartier Bresson was supposedly a straight man taking the photographs, but there are a handful of examples where queer people sort of caught his eye in the street and seemed to him to be interesting subjects – and sure enough, they are. We don’t know who these people are, but there’s something certainly queer about them and something oddly contemporary too. These hidden discoveries of the more subtle queer representation in the collection can feel magical.

INT: I guess that’s kind of shown in the structure of the book, with it being thematic not necessarily chronological. You’ve gone over such a wide period of history (over a century of photography), but you are inherently highlighting similarities about queerness across time or amongst images throughout, page to page.

ZC: Yes, that whole thing about some things just kind of staying the same. I can think of two photographs we place next to one another in the ‘Body’ chapter, which were over 100 years apart. A George Dureau portrait, circa 1979 and an Oscar Gustav Rylander portrait from 1857 – both present very similar aesthetics and typical poses, displaying homoerotic physique photography as a kind of unchanging art. A narrative of art history, where a movement follows movement follows movement, is a bit too neat for this collection, and foxy people don’t always fit into those. These visual continuities are sort of like a hand stretching back through history, which doesn’t make each new thing derivative, and doesn’t just make it a copy of something that’s already been done. Each generation finds fresh, new and exciting ways to keep certain traditions alive.

INT: I think it’s really interesting how you’ve uncovered these parallels and continuities in queer visual culture and queer photographic traditions that may have gone unnoticed without the gathering of all of this material in one place.

In the introduction to the book you mention how the term ‘queer’ has been favoured in this collection of photography as “the best term we have for an expanding community”. I would love to know your thoughts on the word as something that can hold a whole host of identities. How has this perspective expanded into your editorial approach, was it important for you to ensure that the book was inclusive of many different LGBTQIA+ identities?

ZC: Yes, absolutely. Kate Bornstein has said brilliant things about this. She states that it was actually when we added the word queer to LGBT that it caused a schism, because then it felt like people were saying that individuals under LGBT labels were somehow a bit more conservative, or not quite as cool or as edgy as this new thing that came along. ‘Queer’ was kind of saying I’m not gay in this way, or I’m not a lesbian, I’m queer. That then causes friction between the people using an older term, which is very interesting… But that isn’t something that is often really discussed or considered in the community.

INT: That’s really interesting. I guess like a lot of the labels that define the LGBTQIA+ community, ‘queer’ is now something that has been reappropriated or reclaimed, and is for the most part, no longer seen as derogatory.

ZC: Yes, exactly. I think with all of this semantic stuff, we could just talk ourselves into a corner, but I think that is just the wrong road for us to be going down. I would hope that this book fosters a feeling of all of that intersectionality, and all of the places where, well, solidarity is just better, unity is better, and empathy is better.