Thesis abstract:

Rather than understanding the archive and the closet as juxtaposed concepts, this project is motivated by their unsettling resemblances. In what follows, I argue that the overlaps between the archive and the closet are inscribed in the private photo albums and scrapbooks of queer photographers working in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia now kept in public archival institutions. In the introduction of their edited volume Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, sociologist Amy L. Stone and English literature scholar Jamie Cantrell have claimed that both the archive and the closet contain ‘systems of logical organisation and also systems of secret keeping.”[1] Taking this observation as a starting point, this thesis explores the extent to which both systems of logical organisation and systems of secret keeping are bound in the private photo albums, scrapbooks and photocollages of queer photographers practicing in Australia from the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s. Despite their intention for a limited audience, these methods of concealing and organising photographs are some of the most valuable, publicly available sources of information about queer life in Australia during this time. Their importance goes beyond repairing the archive’s failures to render queer life visible, and this has yet to be acknowledged. This thesis argues that the intrinsic historical and aesthetic value of queer scrapbooks, photo albums and photocollages lies in the way that they address both marginal and mainstream publics even though they were originally intended for a limited, private audience.

[1] Amy L. Stone and Jamie Cantrell, “Introduction” in Out of the Closet, Into the Archive: Researching Sexual Histories, (NY: NYU Press, 2015), 3.