ALEX MURPHY

“Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive - recurrent, eddying, troublant."

- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

“The faggots have the routines of community and the rhythms of the street to live by: visiting lunches at small cafes, late day tea, walks, accidental encounters, organising, issuing manifestoes, putting on plays, changing lovers, shifting alliances and living arrangements and gossip, endless gossip. They share shifting notions about the men and power and how to take it away from them. They find routines in their collective lives and turn them into rituals. They created the ritual of the brief encounter, the ritual of dying love and the ritual of outrageousness.”

“This quote from Larry Mitchell’s 1977 cult queer fantastical fable-come-manifesto, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, encapsulates a lot of what queerness is to me, from the joy and expressive release in this notion of ‘the ritual of outrageousness’ to the abundance of interconnections. More than my own personal identity and sexuality, queerness is community rooted. And I mean community not in the vague, intangible sense of the ‘queer community’ but in a network founded on mutual care and support and formed of the people that make me feel like I belong.”

- Kez Cochrane, seen on the right

“the world has always had lovers. And yet as near as I can observe, for thousands of years the concentrated aim of society has been to cut down on kissing. With that same amount of energy [...] society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot.”

- Janet Flanner

QUEER is a collection of film portraits of individuals and connections falling under the umbrella term of 'queer', shot in Bristol and London. Some were strangers to me who reached out online, some close friends, others I met spontaneously at parties who overheard me talking about the series and volunteered to take part, others I saw at queer events and always thought they looked so cool - sending them a message asking if they would be up for it, somehow they all enthusiastically agreed.

Many invited me into their homes and into their relationships, handing me immense trust and vulnerability having never met me before. I was stunned by how many people responded to my casting call, from different cities all over; complete strangers offering to let me take portraits of them and help me out for no reason at all, they simply liked my idea and wanted to be part of it. This piece of work feels very community based to me because of this, and in turn I became very attached to these pictures and had trouble prying the ones that didn’t make the final edit out of my hands.

I wanted to capture queer adulthood, queer joy and queer love, immersing the project in as much connection, vulnerability and authenticity as I could find. I would like to thank everyone who volunteered to take part and I can’t show how much appreciation and love I have for everyone who became part of this collection and allowed me to photograph them, their identities, their personal queer spaces and their relationships, bringing QUEER to life.