Famous gay photographers

Four decades ago, the photographer Tom Bianchi began capturing the nearly 10, gay men who every summer flocked to their Eden in a specific part of New York’s Fire Island. His snapshots are. The list "LGBTQ photographers" has been viewed 39 times. This list has 7 sub-lists and 31 members. See also Photographers, LGBTQ artists. Keith Allen Haring (May 4, – February 16, ) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the s.

Let’s discover trailblazing queer photographers whose work challenge society’s ideas about gender, sexuality, and identity. These artists bring visibility to LGBTQ+ stories that were once ignored or hidden. LGBTQ photography has changed and developed since then, along with the political movement that gave it birth. What follows is a list of largely West Coast LGBTQ photographers from Friedkin’s moment to the present.

Explore the inspiring world of LGBT photographers who are using their art to share their stories. Witness their stunning photos and be inspired by their creative work. June is Pride month and what a perfect time to celebrate LGBTQ photographers and artists who have inspired and continue to do so!

Throughout the history of art, self-expression has long been used to give a unique voice and to bring awareness to individuals, communities, and the diversity of people around the world. There are many contemporary artists who are pushing the envelope without adhering to particular mediums or artistic styles. Their collective work spans mediums such as photography, painting, film making, performance art, mixed media, sculpture, music, collage, pyrography, poetry, and the list goes on and on.

For LGBTQ audiences and the world at large, art is about recognition, where we may recognize and connect with our personal experiences, self-identity, boundaries, creativity, and our emotions. A large amount of this work depicts taboo topics, like sexuality, pain, beauty and societal standards, or an insatiable and uncanny hunger for awareness, acceptance, representation, and meaning. Who inspires us, who moves us, who opens our minds, shapes and molds our creative selves?

Who has motivated us to think outside of the confines of the box? I point to the forward-thinkers, the pioneers, the revolutionaries, the ones who fought for self-expression during times where it would be considered a crime. Whether the work is safe, digestible, or absolutely subversive, and sometimes considered offensive, LGBTQ artists have left a very powerful imprint in the art world.

Their work in the past has helped to weave the fabric that enables queer art to have its voice and leave an imprint on the art world…then and now. She began to fashion her own out of a variety of non-traditional materials, including flowers and pipe cleaners. Gender and sexuality were recurring themes in her doll art, and her figures captured a distressing glamour that was both grim and seductive. She gained a cult following by showing her work in the East Village — just as the art scene there began to flourish — and became a muse to photographers Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar.

Her notable style — which blurred the line between folk art and fine art — produced dolls which were ingeniously constructed of soda bottles and umbrella hinges — even pantyhose — some with glass eyes and layered in paint. Her creations were known to change from show to show — often seeming to lose or gain weight, appearing ill, having face lifts or sex changes.

His work epitomized not just the reality of being gay, but of being a black gay man. It challenged the whole concept of black male masculinity and the importance of body empowerment. Rotimi Fani-Kayode was born in Nigeria, as the second child of a prominent Yorubna family that moved to Brighton, England.

While in New York, he became friendly with Robert Mapplethorpe, who he has claimed as an influence on his work. Using the body as the centralised point in his photography, he was able to explore the relationship between erotic fantasy and his ancestral spiritual values. His complex experience of dislocation, fragmentation, rejection, and separation all shaped his work.

famous photographers

Such a position gives me a feeling of having very little to lose. However, he specifically sought to develop queerness in contemporary African art, which required him to address the colonial and Christian legacies that suppressed queerness and constructed harmful notions of black masculinity. In a time when African artists were not being represented, he provocatively approached the issue by addressing and questioning the objectification of black bodies.

His homoerotic influences in using the black male body can be interpreted as an expression of idealisation, of desire and being desired, and self-consciousness in response to the black body being reduced to a spectacle. A sampling of his Abiku Born to Die series can be seen at the Tate , online or in person. Not only is Fani-Kayode praised for his conceptual imagery of Africanness and queerness and African queerness , he is also praised for his ability to fuse racial and sexual politics with religious eroticism and beauty.

His work is imbued with subtlety, irony and political and social comment. Her photographs of lesbian culture change the image of history for many, especially those who have lived in the socio-political peripheries in the US. She spent a lot of time out in the streets, an experience that shaped her and the way she saw the world: raw, real, and up close.

It was dangerous, and the mafia were never far away.