Grassroots Archivists: Photo Albums from the Queer Archives

Often dismissed as a banal, domestic objects, photo albums have quietly preserved histories otherwise absent from the archives. As queer activists around the world began to imagine queer archives as spaces which could sustain their burgeoning liberation movements, photo albums offered an accessible means through which queer people could record their histories visually when traditional archives refused to do so. From the photo album of editor of Australian House and Garden magazine Beryl Guertner (1948-1956) to gay photojournalist John Jenner’s Death of Friend photo diary (1986-1990), this paper considers a series of photo albums belonging to what I term “grassroots archivists”: ordinary queer people who had the initiative to keep photo albums not only for their nearest and dearest but for future generations of queer people. Drawing on my encounters with personal photographic keepsakes as historical documents and on oral histories recorded with the grassroots archivists responsible for their making and preservation, I reflect on the importance, now more than ever, of photo albums to our queer archives.