Picture Me: Presenting Queer Visual History (PicMe) investigates how queer lives can be identified and interpreted through historical photographs when written records may be lacking. The project moves beyond conventional historical and visual analysis by combining affective, material, and speculative methods to read gestures, spaces, objects, and environments as traces of queerness in the archive. Focusing on Finnish photo collections, from feminist circles and rural communities to domestic homes and wartime albums, we develop new tools for writing queer history from/through images, while making these hidden histories accessible to both scholars and the public.

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Our project helps shape an emerging field we call queer visual history. It brings together insights from queer studies, gender studies, history, geography, and visual culture to ask: how did people in the past express queer and trans lives through their bodies, homes, and everyday surroundings, and how are these expressions recorded or transmitted through the archive?

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Photographs hold traces of lives rarely documented in writing. While the field of visual history offers tools for reading everyday photos, these can assume heterosexual norms. PicMe builds on this work by bringing queer historiography, affective analysis, and considerations of materiality into the research, making hidden queer pasts more visible and relatable today.

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With this in mind, PicMe centres on four research foci:​

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1) What are the repeated visual traces across photographs and photo albums, the analysis of which might suggest a photographer’s or their model’s queerness?

2) What can we learn about queer life by surveying the often intimate, material spaces that contextualise the figures depicted in them?

3) How can affective legacies and queer charges be used to analyse personal photo collections and photo albums?

4) To what extent can experimenting with speculative analysis of photographs work generatively with archival absences in writing queer history?

 

​In doing so, PicMe offers new ways for museums, archives, and heritage institutions to present queer histories when written records are limited, supporting more inclusive exhibitions, collections, and public narratives. We will publish a handbook that will support professional and amateur researchers to pursue queer visual histories themselves.