A giant photograph of two men kissing, displayed on a 20-foot-tall wall, greets Getty Museum visitors at the tram station, advertising the museum’s newest exhibit, “Queer Lens: A History of Photography.” 

The exhibit focuses on how, since its invention in 1839, photography gave rise to homosocial, homoerotic and homosexual imagery, even through eras of censorship and destruction. The collection features more than 270 photographs that depict expressions of gender and sexuality.

Ryan Linkof, co-curator and USC alum, said this type of exhibition, which highlights LGBTQIA+ history, is needed right now.

“Queer histories are something that tend to have been erased for a variety of reasons, either because people were afraid to tell these stories [or] couldn’t tell these stories, and so finding ways to kind of excavate that history and show that history and show the ways in which queer people have been here and are here, is really important,” Linkof said.

Linkof said one of his favorite pieces of the collection is the photograph entitled “The Gay Deceiver” (1939) by Weegee.

“The image shows this young man being put into the back of the [paddy] wagon but turning back full frontal to Weegee’s camera with his high-intensity flashbulb,” Linkof said. “You just see him kind of lift the leg of his dress, this act and smiling, and just this act of like real pure queer joy in the middle of something that obviously was painful and difficult, but kind of finding that space and being who you are.”

Vanessa Schwartz, an art history and history professor as well as director of the Visual Studies Research Institute at USC, said she’s also aware of LGBTQIA+ history erasure currently.

“The ‘Queer Lens’ is particularly interesting because the Getty, being a large and private institution, isn’t affected in the way that the Smithsonian is from current governmental assaults on art museums and art exhibitions — although, it could happen too,” Schwartz said. “It’s very interesting for the students also to see how a private institution has the independence also to do things that maybe even the government doesn’t.” 

Schwartz believes that photography was a way for the LGBTQIA+ community to self-represent in a time when their representation was not visible in the mainstream.

“People enlisted photography to, in a sense, celebrate their lives or count certain moments or to make themselves visible even to themselves. Because something that dare not speak its name [sic], it’s very difficult then to see yourself in representation,” Schwartz said. 

Jessica Hanson, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at USC, whose dissertation focuses on pop culture in the 20th century, was inspired and touched to see the Getty host an exhibit of this magnitude on this topic. 

“To see these kinds of shows that trace the timeline of queer identity and queer aesthetic and creation through, in this case, decades, is particularly important in this time of political strife to know that it’s not the first time there’s been issues from the outside world, and that it’ll continue to be a discussion that’s really important and worth having in these cultural spaces and beyond,” Hanson said.

One of the oldest photographs in the collection, Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, aka Fanny and Stella (c. 1870), features two male performers who were famous for their female impersonation. They wore women’s clothes on and off stage, eventually leading to their arrest under charges of conspiring to commit an “unnatural offence.”

As the federal government erases photographic references of members of the LGBTQIA+ community from its websites, the necessity for an exhibition like this is clearer than ever, Linkof said.

“A lot of cultural institutions and universities are being asked to think about the ways that they tell certain kinds of histories, and I think this is a great example of how you can tell that history as an affirmative story of joy and love and power that really resonates, especially as we think about this divisive moment that we’re in,” Linkof said.

“Queer Lens: A History of Photography” will be on display until September 28th at the Getty Museum.