Sleeping Hermaphroditus. Greek marble, Roman copy of the 2nd century CE after a Hellenistic original of the 2nd century BC, restored in 1619 by David Larique; mattress: Carrara marble, made by Gianlorenzo Bernini in 1619 on Cardinal Borghese’s request.
About
The History of Queer Photography website explores how photography has shaped and recorded LGBTQI lives. It traces key moments in these visual histories—from early pathologising images to activist reappropriations and contemporary queer portraits—without assuming a simple, linear journey “from discrimination to visibility.” Designed for students, scholars, and anyone interested in LGBTQI issues and photography, the site offers resources that support both learning and critical reflection.
The platform gathers LGBTQI-related archival materials, short historical introductions, and student projects. These include photo-texts on key figures or practices, curated galleries that juxtapose different understandings of gender, and photomontages that question stereotypes and inherited visual norms. In dialogue with these, the site also points toward related photographic regimes—such as medical, colonial, and documentary images—that have helped define, pathologise, or erase bodies outside binary norms.
The main sections—Theoretical and Critical Tools, Collections, and Workshops / Student Projects—are designed to work together. Theoretical and Critical Tools provide essays, guides, and basic frameworks for analysing photographs and thinking about gender and sexuality in visual terms. Collections showcase selected historical archives and examples of contemporary queer photography. Workshops and Student Projects highlight assignments in which students reinterpret images, assemble galleries, or create photomontages in order to question norms and experiment with more open representations.
Together, these sections invite users to develop informed, critical perspectives on gender and photography. Rather than treating ambiguity—the capacity of an image or record to sustain more than one plausible reading—as a simple problem to be fixed, the site encourages users to notice where images feel open, unresolved, or contradictory, and to use those moments as starting points for questions, discussion, and new ways of imagining gendered and queer lives.
The timeline below offers a chronological overview of selected moments in the intertwined history of photography and LGBTQI representations.