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Queer Friendships

2026

A participatory portrait project exploring queer friendship, connection, and community.

Narrative

Queer Friendships explores the relationships that shape queer communities. The portraits focus on friends photographed together, capturing gestures of closeness, humour, care, and shared presence.

For many queer people, friendships can hold a central place in everyday life. These relationships often become spaces of belonging and emotional support. The series reflects the many ways queer friendships evolve, from playful companionship to deep bonds built through shared experiences.

Inspiration

The project is informed by reflections on queer community and the ways friendships can become spaces of care, solidarity, and connection.

It also draws on documentary and portrait photography traditions that focus on relationships between people. Rather than isolating the individual subject, the work centres interaction, body language, and proximity as ways of expressing intimacy between friends.

Technical Details

The portraits are created in a simple studio setup using a neutral backdrop and minimal props such as a couch or stools. Friends are photographed together in small groups, allowing space for natural interaction.

The images are presented in black and white to emphasise expression, gesture, and emotional presence while creating a consistent visual language across the series.

Through studio portraits of friends photographed together, the series reflects the many ways queer people support, care for, and show up for one another.

Mock-up layout of the Queer Friendships portrait series

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Friendship can be a place where care, intimacy, and belonging are created together.

Themes

The project explores themes of intimacy, friendship, and relational space within queer communities.

Queer friendships often create networks of care and belonging that exist alongside or beyond traditional structures of family and partnership. Through portraiture, the series reflects how gestures, proximity, humour, and shared presence communicate forms of connection between friends.

Participatory project

Queer Friendships is designed as a participatory project involving members of the queer community.

Participants are invited to attend a short studio portrait session with a friend or small group of friends. Each session lasts approximately twenty minutes and encourages natural interaction so the photographs capture genuine moments between people.

Participants may also share a short reflection about their friendship. These texts can accompany the portraits and provide insight into the relationships represented in the series.

Research context

The project sits within a broader photographic tradition that explores intimacy, identity, and community through portraiture.

Photographers such as Nan Goldin have documented queer friendships and social networks through intimate photographic narratives. Artists like Catherine Opie and Wolfgang Tillmans have also explored relationships and community through portraiture and everyday moments of connection.

The project is also informed by queer writing on relationality and community, including the work of Sara Ahmed and José Esteban Muñoz, whose work highlights how queer communities create networks of belonging and care.

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