 |
| Larry Wolf, Collage in My Lap (2025) |
Shared Queer Space
From 2003 - 2014 the house I lived in at 144 Powers was the central gathering point for socializing and artmaking and it really was my muse. I began photographing friends in the kitchen and backyard. I then moved to photographing in my bedroom, where the sheets and pillows where my friends sat became a recurring landscape and an important foundation for the work. So bringing some of these images into the Alice Austen House definitely resonates with that history of domestic portraiture, friendship and intimacy in a home which becomes a shared, queer space. ...
The mid-2000s, when I began my first portrait projects, when I was enmeshed within the Queer Zine revival, the debut of BUTT Magazine and its countless spin-offs, and the emergence of online social networking sites Friendster, Myspace, Manhunt and Adam4Adam.
I was distributing my work through zines and online, and the digital dissemination of the work immediately left the realm of my control and authorship. My interest quickly shifted from straight portraiture to the ways in which queer portraiture was being used and recontextualized, how the same portrait could serve both as artwork in one context and as solicitation in another.
... in retrospect, it is interesting how I found stability through the discovery of a history of photographic portraiture's relationship to literature. In literature the author and the subject more easily slipped, swapped places, lingered in the space where the roles co-exist.
A Note on the Photograph
The photograph is of the objects in my lap while flying home from a weekend in New York as seen by my dual-lens camera.
The objects include the catalog for Paul Mpagi Sepuya's exhibition, 144 Powers, at the Alice Austin House, 2022.
No comments:
Post a Comment