Arts and Cultural Criticism

The latest in the groundbreaking series of photobooks on LGBTQ life around the world, an intimate, personal collection of photographs on the queer community in the U.S.

Recent years have seen an unprecedented push by state legislatures to pass anti-LGBTQ bills across the United States. Hundreds of laws, mainly attempting to ban access to gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth and to ban discussions of gender identity and sexuality from high school curriculums, have been introduced this year alone—a new and deeply troubling record.

In these times visual representation of queer love is as important as it has ever been, and in Transcend, award-winning Taiwanese American photographer Sandra Chen Weinstein showcases some of the work from a long career of photographing the LGBTQ community, especially the trans community. Weinstein’s own child recently came out as queer, trans, and non-binary at the age of twenty-eight, and the core of the book is a series of photographs that focuses on their relationship.

A gorgeously packaged, full-color book, Transcend challenges many assumptions about LGBTQ life in the United States and is an enduring visual testament to the strength, resilience, and joy of the queer community in the face of discrimination, inequality, and violence.

Transcend was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

An inspiring and beautifully produced series of photo-portraits of LGBTQ Russians living in an increasingly homophobic Russia

Do we want children from elementary school to be imposed with things that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want them to be taught that instead of men and women, there are supposedly some other genders and to be offered sex-change surgeries?—President Vladimir Putin

In late 2022, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dragged on, President Vladimir Putin signed new legislation cracking down on LGBTQ communities. Almost ten years earlier, Russia had enacted a federal law that prohibited the promotion of “non-traditional sexual values”—seen as Western values—to anyone under the age of eighteen. Known by many as the “gay propaganda law,” it has been used to silence any public discussion or positive messaging about LGBTQ issues in any place or format accessible to minors, including the media and online. The new legislation expands on the 2013 law to cover all ages and all media, causing many to fear for a new wave of homophobic violence.

In Ordinary People, Ksenia Kuleshova, a rising star in the world of photography, has taken a series of color portraits, accompanied by short interviews, of LGBTQ Russians who, despite the relentless homophobia from politicians, religious leaders, and the media, remain open about their sexuality and seek happiness and joy in their everyday lives. Kuleshova also looks beyond Russia’s borders to people in former Soviet states, many of which have taken their lead from Russia’s homophobic policies. Powerful and intimate, Ordinary People is a moving and ultimately joyful testament to the survival and resilience of the LGBTQ community in one of the most oppressive countries in the world.

Ordinary People was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

A stunning collection of photographs of the LGBTQ community in Thailand, from one of the world’s most renowned photographers

Steve McCurry is the artist behind some of the most iconic images in contemporary photography. His 1984 portrait of Sharbat Gula (“the Afghan girl”) on the cover of National Geographic remains widely recognized to this day. Now McCurry turns his attention to Thailand as part of a series of photobooks on LGBTQ communities around the world.

Thailand has long had the reputation as one of the most gay-friendly destinations in Asia, particularly Bangkok with its nightlife and its relative openness and safety. While this may be true for tourists and expats, the idea of Thailand as a haven for LGBTQ people and for same-sex couples, heavily promoted by the tourist industry, does not necessarily extend to Thais themselves. While Thailand is home to the largest LGBTQ communities in Asia, the reality for them is less accepting. Discrimination and exclusion targeting LGBTQ people continues despite a nominally progressive stance on inclusion, and same-sex marriage remains illegal.

Against this backdrop, McCurry’s lushly colored photographs take us into the vibrant LGBTQ community in Bangkok, and this beautifully packaged, affordably priced book gives us a series of close to one hundred moving and intimate portraits of people who are no longer welcome in the community in which they grew up, but who have forged a new life and a new meaning of family in the queer community.

Belonging was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

A collaboration between the National Book Award–winning journalist and the prize-winning photographer on the queer-resistance theater troupe

In the fall of 2017, the internationally acclaimed underground theater troupe Belarus Free Theatre took New York by storm for a production of their harrowing anti-torture, anti-Putin play, Burning Doors. They were joined by Maria Alyokhina, a member of Russian punk group Pussy Riot, who made international headlines when they were imprisoned for staging an anti-Putin performance in a Moscow cathedral. The play met with enthusiastic acclaim from critics, with New York magazine praising it as a “smart, smoldering, physically brutal piece of theater.”

In Two Women in Their Time, award-winning documentary photographer Misha Friedman and New Yorker reporter Masha Gessen take us backstage, giving us an intimate look at this fiercely creative drama troupe that cannot officially perform in its homeland, which remains a dictatorship in all but name. The result is an astonishing series of photos documenting the group’s productions in New York and Gessen and Friedman’s visit to Minsk to meet Svetlana Sugako and Nadezhda Brodskaya, the young lesbian couple who keep the Belarus Free Theatre running. They live a life in the borderlands—between underground and public, between the closet and being out, in a country where same-sex sexual activity is legal yet remains taboo. Their work proves that queerness will always be dangerous to autocracy.

Two Women in Their Time was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

A beautifully packaged and profound exploration of human desire and queer sexuality in Latin America by the acclaimed Argentinian photographer Claudia Jares

In Dark Tears, award-winning Argentinian photographer and performance artist Claudia Jares takes her lens to the reality of queer experience in Argentina, Venezuela, and across Latin America, exploring questions of sexuality, religion, and identity with the raw eroticism that is the hallmark of her style. Here she tells the stories of a number of people struggling to come to terms with their identity in a region that, despite much progress in LGBTQ rights in recent years, still moves to a strongly conservative Christian heartbeat that condemns same-sex relations and reveres the institution of the heteronormative family.

Drawing on the queer traditions of burlesque and drag, Dark Tears is a journey into an interior erotic landscape as it profiles a number of different couples—gay, lesbian, gender nonconforming—to delve into the hidden corners and diverse configurations of human desire as it conflicts with more staid, traditional values. A balance of celebrating acceptance and recalling the clandestine, furtive history of queer sexuality, these explicit black-and-white and color images are a challenge to the viewer as voyeur, but also an invitation to enter with empathy into the intimate world of Jares’s subjects.

Dark Tears was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

Part of the ongoing series of photobooks published with the Arcus Foundation and Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios on queer communities around the world, a stunning portrait of a community battling homophobia in Serbia

In June 2001, Serbia witnessed its first gay pride parade in history in Belgrade’s central square. It was a short-lived march, as an ultranationalist mob quickly descended on the participants, chanting homophobic slurs and injuring dozens. For years afterward, fear of violence prevented further marches, and when, in October 2010, the next pride march finally went ahead, it again devolved into violence as anti-gay rioters, firing shots and hurling petrol bombs, fought the police. It was only in 2014 that a pride march was held uninterrupted, albeit under heavy police protection.

In Lives in Transition, photographer Slobodan Randjelovic captures the struggles and successes of twenty LGBTQ people living throughout Serbia—a conservative, religious country where, despite semi-progressive LGBTQ protection laws, homophobia fueled by religious authorities and right-wing political parties remains deeply entrenched. In a country where lack of employment opportunity and hostile families frequently drive queer people into poverty and isolation, these individuals have struggled to build a community that will offer solace, protection, and even joy. Lives in Transition portrays remarkable and inspiring resilience in the human struggle against a repressive social environment and demonstrates how friendship and community can help people shape their own futures.

Lives in Transition was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).