'I stand behind all the work I've made, including the mistakes' – Q&A with Del LaGrace Volcano

Which photo or series of photos are you most proud of?

My first thought is that there have been so many totally thrilling moments making the photographs over the decades it is impossible to choose. The times when ‘props’ I could never afford drive by, seemingly happy to be stopped long enough to allow me to persuade them to let me borrow their big bike for few minutes. The location for Dyke Pussy Patrol, with Cherry Smyth and Beth, behind the Old King’s Cross was also the location where the Director of Public Prosecutions had just been arrested for kerb crawling a few weeks before we made the series in 1991. That’s my kind of kismet, where the unexpected shock on the faces of two passing heterosexuals in matching jumpers walking by our cruising scene. Totally unscripted and the result of a perfectly timed universal karmic inter-action. If this comes across as esoteric or new agey, too bad, it works for me and my work. And with my tripolar Jewish/Wiccan/Mormon early religious background I get it.

“Out & Proud” has never been my mantra but I get that too. I stand behind all the work I’ve made, including the mistakes. Some images work better than others, in terms of my own personal criteria and what I want to communicate or invoke. Now that I am fully immersed in cataloguing and digitising fifty years of analogue negatives and positives I have a chance to look again and see how much I missed.

Why have you chosen photography as your primary medium?

Because it delivers immediate or near enough gratification and because early on I discovered I enjoyed every aspect of it, from the science of its toxic chemistry and the mysteries revealed in the darkroom to the socio-political potential and tragic photographic facts. Because I immediately got jobs in photography departments and a part time job as a theatre photographer. However, at the time, given a choice – economically speaking, as a scholarship student at an elite art school – I would have chosen film. But then I thought again.

I grew up roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco in both Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. Choosing film basically meant Hollywood and more commercial road. Choosing San Francisco stood for independent film, art and culture. My mother was born in Independence, Missouri (in Chinese Year of the Rabbit for those interested, or not) and that star has always been my guide.

Is there anything you wish you’d photographed that you didn’t capture at the time?

Yes, absolutely. I wish I’d made more photographs with Kate Millet when she was just beginning to build her Farm, her feminist compound. I wish I had pushed myself a lot more sometimes, even though I know I pushed myself to my limits most of the time. I have to remind myself that “more is not always better”. I am pretty sure that I was influenced by Susan Sontag’s attitude towards the overabundance of images, not just circulating the planet – and this long before the internet – but in the privileging of quantity over quality. So there was a point where I decided to give myself a soft limit and make not more than one to two rolls of analogue film (10-20) and no more than 50 tests on digital before making the final analogue. I do sometimes make work entirely on digital or even on an iPhone and I can be disappointed when that analogue isn’t as good, either due to focus or the moment.

I would say that what I wish is that I understood much earlier how important it is to create images with our nascent, ever-evolving queer communities, past, present and future. I wish I had been better in terms of names, dates and details and taken better care of the raw materials. I am sad that I incorporated by osmosis the cultural belief that I didn’t matter, that we didn’t matter. I didn’t value myself or my work as much as I could have, should have, would have, had I known what I know now, what I am still learning. That we are “bodies that matter” (thanks JB).

How do you negotiate access to the highly intimate spaces your work documents?

What I think is needed here is another way of thinking about work and how it is made. So from brain to fingers to keyboard the short answer is, I don’t. I discovered some time ago that I need to have a connection with whomever I work with before we work together. If I have any real talent then it is a talent for getting to know people below the surface in a relatively short space of time. Sure, it could be my Cancer Moon in the 12th house of deep empathy or it could be because I am able to observe nuances, auras, body language and/or pheromones and get a sense of who I am working with. I don’t negotiate access because part of the beauty of taking people out into the world, is that we CREATE our own access through the appropriation of spaces we are not deemed to belong in. I am like a film director/writer/actor and producer in addition to all the technical aspects of the photographic process. This means taking responsibility for the well-being of those involved. Then there is that quote from Michel Foucault that (paraphrased) means people want to ‘speak sex and hear it spoken’. Visually speaking, n’est pas?

There are times I find it difficult to be perceived as a documentary photographer because it is more complicated than that. I also find it interesting because it makes me question why. The answer I think is at least in part because of how photography has historically not been granted ‘high art’ status until relatively recently, and I would still argue that there is a hierarchy of value and assumption that photography is not really ‘art’ but only documentation.

And finally there is the queer quantum physics of it all. I am a Super Leo and the Sun, my ruling planet, does have the ability to pull other celestial bodies into its orbit, at least for a moment. My other major planetary luminary is the Moon in Cancer, which for me translates into both a need and a huge capacity for connecting with others I come into contact with. We seem to find each other at the right time, right place. At least we did until I moved to Sweden, where it took a bit of time to get back behind the camera again after my extended parental MaPa sabbatical.

Is the idea of ‘legacy’ important to how you understand your creative practice? If so, what would you like the legacy of your work to be?

Although the concept of legacy sounds slightly pompous, it is not that I am unaccustomed to tooting my own horn! Maybe it’s because legacy seems to imply that one is ready to leave it all behind? Well, okay, so, I already know that my work has made a big difference in the lives of so many queer people because so many have either told me so in person, or written in great detail about what this work means to them. There are scores of PhDs and MA theses written about various aspects of my work, and book and magazine covers featuring images of me or made by me. And while these forms of attention are in some ways necessary to survive, they do not a legacy make.

If we define legacy as what one leaves behind then what I want is for THE QUEER FUCKING ARCHIVE OF RESISTANCE to have a permanent home, in a physical place that will attract queers from all over the globe. And for the past six years, with this goal in mind, I have been working hard to organize, digitize and catalogue the enormous volume of work made over the course of five decades. From negatives of all sizes to video in all formats, plus Super 8, audio tapes, letters, flyers, news articles, books, badges and so much more. I need to work with someone who really understands the value of my archive and has the kind of skills to make it coherent.

My dream is to live in an art compound that could house my amazing library, and be a space to exhibit, perform and learn. I can envision a queer research resort, with a sauna, near a Swedish lake. I see myself wrapped in blankets in a comfy chair in front of a campfire telling queer stories from the mid to late twentieth century to the youngsters who can barely imagine a world without devices but feel nostalgic for it anyway. Every night could be story night and my voice, only one in the queer cacophony of our lives.