Get to know Del LaGrace Volcano, the legendary photographer who's defined – and revolutionised – LGBTQI+ visual culture

A few weeks before their 69th birthday on 26 July – a date shared with Carl Jung, James Lovelock and Sandra Bullock – Del LaGrace Volcano gives me a video tour of their Swedish apartment. The white walls are filled with photographs, primarily their own, but also by friends, while a stack of magazines includes issues that feature their 1995 work, Portrait With Blue Beard, on the cover.

‘I surround myself with my people,’ explains Volcano, who resides in an area they characterise as distinctly un-queer, just outside Örebro city centre. The adorned walls, essentially a gallery of their communities, are a necessary tonic.

An early instigator of LGBTQI+ visual culture, Volcano started taking photographs in the 1970s, and spent the subsequent two decades developing a reputation for their powerful, oftentimes intimate, bodies of work examining sex and identity, made in and around the queer spaces they inhabited at the time. ‘I'm a bit of a sociologist, and just constantly curious,’ they say.

In 2019, their portraits of drag kings – published as a book with Jack Halberstam 20 years earlier – appeared in the group show ‘Kiss My Genders’ at the Hayward Gallery, while in 2023 the Tate exhibition ‘Women In Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990’ brought new eyes to their Queer Dyke Cruising pictures: chief amongst them was Isabella Burley of Climax Books, who published the series in full last year.

The Tate show, via curator Linsey Young, additionally introduced the artist to Dr. Maggie Matić, director of London gallery Auto Italia, where their major new solo exhibition has just opened. ‘Sensual / Mutual’ runs through 25 October with a sister show, ‘Love Bites Back’, following at Edinburgh Art Festival from 14-30 August. While the former focuses on America and the dyke scene Volcano was part of in the 1970s and '80s – the lesbian biker bar Scott’s P.I.T. and the artist-run Goodman Building in San Francisco both feature, as well as ARF, or Asylum for Rowdy Females and Dogs, in Santa Fe – the Scottish show draws from their Queer Archive of Resistance, highlighting work made in England and Scotland between 1982 and 1995.

‘Everything I make work about is something my heart is attached to – it’s not possible to separate,’ says Volcano (their very first photographs were of their sister, while past lovers appear frequently in their pictures). ‘I have no imagination, really, only the life I lead. This thing of looking at gender, it's not just because it's interesting, it affects me personally.’

Until their teens Volcano, who is intersex and employs the term 'hermaphrodyke,' was socialised as a girl; the 1995 blue beard portrait, made when they were in their late 30s, was the first time they had grown out their facial hair.

‘I love landscape [photography], but if a person, especially a queer body, doesn't disrupt a kind of normative space, what is it?’ they continue. ‘My life and the people I draw into my orbit are all part of my work. There’s lots of mirrors in it, people reflecting back at each other and literal mirrors, which I now understand is a way of looking at myself, making avatars for people.’

Leather biker jackets are one such device in this vein, and feature in one of the more, otherwise traditional, portraits in ‘Love Bites Back’. Volcano’s then-girlfriend, Sylvia McFarlane, sits on a patterned sofa in Edinburgh in 1989; her arm is around her grandparents, who sport warm, knowing smiles and the younger couple’s chunky black jackets, lapels full of badges.

It’s not lost on Volcano that the new shows concentrate on their early work, despite their career straddling five decades. ‘It does seem like there's been a renaissance. The time I was most active doing this work – the '80s, '90s, early 2000s – is really resonating with people now,’ they note, negotiating the cycle of generational nostalgia aloud.

It’s worth mentioning also, how the politics of those core decades correlates with the contemporary landscape, from the homophobia encouraged by Section 28 and the AIDS crisis, to today’s growing confidence in anti-trans and far right ideology. Volcano’s work, with its depictions of queer sex and attention to lesbians and gender-non conforming people specifically, has largely failed to break into the mainstream.

‘I was good friends with Derek Jarman the last two years of his life. We would have lunch and he would drag me to his gallery,’ says Volcano, relaying their relationship with this version of the art world. ‘He tried so hard to share his access, but people were absolutely not interested in anything to do with lesbians’.

This conversation around visibility extends also to funding, and for their part Volcano says this has transformed really in the last five years. With financial support from the Swedish Arts Council for example, they were able to have a residency in Berlin, where they had the space to truly study their archive (this no doubt contributed to the way ‘Sensual / Mutual’ and ‘Love Bites Back’ came together).

In Edinburgh these ideas will be further expanded, as Volcano’s material presence is amplified when their work spills out of the gallery space across billboards that are planned for the city centre. Typically concerned with foregrounding ‘communities that are not especially seeking recognition, but are considered either illegal, illegible, invalid’, as their practice has long been, this kind of engagement with urban architecture feels properly exciting.

'Sensual / Mutual' at Auto Italia is in London until 25 October. 'Love Bites Back' is on view in Scotland as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival from 14-30^tAugust.