A Look at GME's Hugh Bell Photo Collection In Honor of LGBTQ+ History Month
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On the occasion of October being LGBTQ+ History Month, GME reflects on gems from our photo collections that were taken by queer photographers and/or spotlight the beauty and diversity of queer communities over the past several decades. First up is Hugh Bell, a highly-prolific visual artist whose candid images of LGBTQ+ community members in the 1980s and ‘90s remain potent historical artifacts. Looking back on these photos today, they register as utterly of their time and are simultaneously infused with a liveliness, immediacy, and unvarnished authenticity that render them timeless. It's also worth noting that notwithstanding Bell's heterosexuality, his gaze never feels exploitative or voyeuristic; his images of queer folk are rendered with unexpected sensitivity.
Bell was a renowned art and commercial photographer who worked in New York City over the course of his entire professional career. Upon his death in 2012, his son-in-law, Richard Martha, was named Executor of the Estate of Hugh Bell. In 2014, Gartenberg Media Enterprises was engaged on an exclusive basis by the Bell Estate to manage the collection of Bell’s photographs and to further the artist’s legacy through exhibitions, licensing, and the sale of his archive.
Early in his career, Bell was befriended by the cinema vérité pioneer Richard Leacock, who was interested in helping underrepresented artists find a professional footing in the industry. This ethos was particularly important for Bell, a Black man, and it informed much of his work photographing queer folks, in moments of both private intimacy and public exaltation, at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The pictures selected above are highlights of the material, currently available through GME, in Bell’s slate of photos focused on queer and trans folks. Their impact is immediate and their sheer beauty is undeniable; particularly compelling is Bell’s ability to honestly and sympathetically center a given subject while enmeshing his vision of them with the natural environment and elements at play.
Bell eschews a staged, posed, or deliberately-lit style and embraces what other image-makers might consider flaws or obstructions. A chain-link fence partially obfuscating a man kissing his lover on the cheek while seated on the edge of a dock, for example. Or the suffusion of highly-textured natural light on a performer decked out in flowers and fruit.
There’s also Bell’s ability to transform viewers assumptions about a given moment captured within an image, his lens engendering a multitude of emotions and revelations the longer one looks — like in the third selection in this photoset. What might initially read as a quarrel, an exhilarating moment of conflict, reveals its warmth and vivacity upon second glance.
Explore additional LGBTQ+ photographs in our Hugh Bell collection by clicking this link, and be sure to check out our wide breadth of Bell photos — such as his images of jazz greats, Afro-Caribbean culture, Spain, theatrical performers, dancers, and models — by visiting his artist profile on our website.
For questions and additional information regarding our photography collections, contact David Deitch, fine arts curator, at david@gartenbergmedia.com.