13. JJ Levine’s Queer Portraits
Levine’s large-scale photography project captures his own community of friends, lovers and siblings in their own domestic spaces in Montreal, Canada, aiming to expose the intricacies of what we surround ourselves with in our homes as queers often alienated by public spaces. Of the project, Levine writes: “I am interested in expressing fierceness, beauty, and resistance through the confrontational gaze of my subjects and the aesthetic of a queer subculture, a goal that underlies the series and my work as a whole.”
14. Lupe Salinas’ Las Otras
This series of portraits by Salinas, a New York based artist from Idaho, was her way of  “(re)imaging an often disregarded group through collaborative image and text, “Las Otras” offers insight to (re)think and (re)visualize the Queer Latin@ identity.
15. Barbara Proud’s First Comes Love
For her “traveling exhibition of photographs that document the lives and relationships of couples in the LGBT community,” Barbara Proud has been photographing same-sex couples who have been together for over ten years since 2009. In addition to being exhibited in locations across the country, First Comes love is also a video and a book.
16. Ashley Kolodner’s GAYFACE
Ashley photographed queers with their eyes closed and open — offering first vulnerability, and then looking you straight in the eyeballs. In her artist statement, Kolodner declared, “this collection of works is done to portray the innovative, personal, and participatory face of the gay movement and American culture at large and in the home.”
17. Angela Jiminez’s Womyn’s Land
There are certainly lots of controversies regarding the creation and execution of lesbian separatist’s communities over time, but these lands are a vital element of our history and Jimenez’s project, commissioned by The New York Times, is one of only a few focused on lesbian elders. There are over 100 “below-the-radar lesbian communities” in North America, and Jimenez visited many of them to record a style that many fear is near extinction.
18. Bernd Ott & Emily Besa’s All The People
The pair behind this project traveled around the world talking to people about their gender expression and identity. Although the project is not explicitly LGBTQ, there are certainly myriad overlaps with the queer and trans community. Besa told Buzzfeed, “A lot of projects we found tend to focus on one aspect of being non-binary or non-conforming and we were particularly interested in relating the infinite possibilities of gender expression and identity.”
19. Jess T Dugan’s Every Breath We Drew
Dugan wanted to look at her vision of masculine identity, what it means to be a man, and how fluid that identity is in different contexts. “These gender roles are failing everyone, not just trans people,” Dugan told Slate.com. “We need to unravel that and give everyone some breathing room.”
20. Toni Latour’s The Femme Project
Latour documented and interviewed self-identified queer femmes in her Vancouver community, seeking to give visual representation to a group “in a world where invisibility is common.” “In bringing participants in to record their stories and capture their images, The Femme Project relays parts of their lives to wider audiences,” writes Toni, “both uniting the group and offering insights into their commonalities and differences.”
21. Robin Hammond’s Where Love Is Illegal
Robin Hammond visited seven countries where persecution of LGBTI people is widespread, and connected with local activists who helped him find subjects who had been survivors of discrimination and abuse. He eventually expanded the project to include LGBTI people from all over the world who had experienced discrimination, recording their stories and images on instagram and raising money through his non-profit Witness Change, which aims to produce “highly visual storytelling on seldom-addressed human rights abuses.”
22. Meg Allen’s “Butch“
I’m gonna be honest and tell you that this series really butters my bread in so many ways. I could probably just look at this for the rest of my life and be totally content. She captures a diverse array of subjects inhabiting a variety of interpretations of a butch identity, including some familiar faces — and even a few couples!
There’s a silver-haired firefighter, a bartender with a chihuahua tattoo, a cartoonist in Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas, a weightlifter, a biker, a pregnant woman, the St. Harridan folks, a BDSM author, and so many ties, cute haircuts, wrinkles. “BUTCH is an adjective,” says Allen, who began the project just photographing her friends and then branched out into every corner of the butch universe. “And like all adjectives, it is fluid and subjective. Just as there are many types of hot women, there are many types of butches…”
