A brand new ebook celebrates the range of the queer images scene
Over 50 photographers have contributed to New Queer Photography – a homage to what its editor Benjamin Wolbergs describes as "a multitude of different styles and visual worlds beyond clichés and prejudices".
Art Director Wolbergs came up with the idea for the book four years ago while working on a collection of "body photographs" from the 1950s – something he describes as "clearly intended to appeal to a gay audience". It sparked some questions about what a book of contemporary gay and queer photography would look like today.
Inspired by the work of photographers like Florian Hertz and Matt Lambert, who spoke to CR last year about the challenges of capturing explicit images, Wolbergs set out to put together a collection of images dealing with drag, gender, queerness and transsexuality.
Picture above: by Matt Lambert: above: by Kostis Fokas
From Spyros Runs
By Melody Melamed
The images in the book range from Richard Hammond's portraits of LGBTQI + people in countries where homosexuality is illegal, to Julia Gunther's photographs of the Miss Lesbian beauty pageant in a Cape Town parish and Dustin Thierry's pictures of ballroom scenes from around the world.
Wolbergs describes the process behind the book as sometimes challenging – not least finding a publisher. In the introduction to the title, however, he emphasizes the joy and excitement that can be found in a “peripheral perspective”.
"Doesn't working on the margins leave room for a freer and more experimental creative process that is very different from that which conforms to and conforms to all norms and expectations of mainstream society?" he writes. "And isn't the fringes of society fertile ground that produces great and exciting stories and remarkable works of art?"
New Queer Photography is published by Verlag Kettler at a price of € 58