Gallery Gwyn, Aberaeron, 12 Oct. – 23 Nov. 2024, as part of the group exhibition Inter_Change
For this project, I scanned personal photo albums, diaries and sketchbooks dating from the mid-to-late 1980s. I came of age—and came out as gay—at a time when homophobia was rife and AIDS was fatal, even in so-called developed countries such as my native (West) Germany.
Retroactive Selfies is an intimate portrait of queer self-representation in an era before social media. All images existed first as analogue photographs. In some of them, my hand can be seen holding the camera as I gaze into a mirror. Other shots were created with the aid of a timer.
Rolls of film were costly. Unlike professional photographers, I generally relied on a single shot for each picture. While poses were rehearsed and angles arranged, chance played a part in the making of these images. Entrusting their development to a commercial photo studio on the high street could also be inhibiting.
Before pasting the photographs into albums and diaries, I manipulated some of them by adding coloured paper, mirror and vinyl foil, watercolour, pastels and gold marker. The creative process allowed me to reclaim the images from the developer and transform printed multiples into one-of-a-kind mementos. It enabled me to process anxieties and construct alternative narratives.
These pictures straddle the line between portraiture and masquerade; but they were not meant to be art. They have never been exhibited in a gallery, until now. Looking at them anew, from an art historical perspective, I appreciate their postmodernist grappling with identity. Back then, I was unaware of such currents in the artworld. Finishing high school, I became an apprentice in a health insurance. Then, as a conscientious objector, I performed community service at a trauma hospital.
Retroactive Selfies is situated in an era spanning the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the context of my story, it demarcates a period of transition, beginning with my first trip to New York City, where I had my earliest sexual encounters in 1985, and culminating in my move there in 1990 to be with my first lover.
Many of the pictures show me at my parental home in North Rhine-Westphalia, where I lived until 1988. After a return visit some thirty-four years later, in December 2022, I determined to turn these hidden images into retroactive selfies to reflect on queer—and lost—lives still waiting to be acknowledged.
Harry Heuser 