The Queer Beach

“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality.”
—José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

Queer Beach responds to Photo Fringe’s Feedback Loop by asking how places produce photographs—and how photographs produce spaces. The beach is not a backdrop but a threshold between land and sea, visibility and concealment, freedom and surveillance: a commons shaped by desire, cruising and resistance.

Beginning with Brighton’s Men’s Beach and Duke’s Mound, the exhibition connects local experience with wider queer coastal histories. A site shapes who gathers and what can be photographed; images then act upon it. By making queer bodies visible, photography can turn an overlooked meeting place into a cultural landscape.

For Henri Lefebvre, space is socially produced through practice and representation. Photography participates by naming places, circulating meanings and creating relations. Sara Ahmed’s “queer orientation” redirects bodies and attention from prescribed paths. Muñoz understands queerness as potentiality: a horizon of what might become possible. Photography and imagination can thus queer a space by projecting other ways of gathering, desiring and belonging. When such images circulate and are collectively inhabited, imagined space can become socially real.

The exhibition was produced by the Socially Engaged Art Salon and curated by Gil Mualem-Doron

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Pierre-Yves Monnerville (1977–2026), a gifted photographer and cherished member of the Sussex BPOC Photography Collective.