Susan Sontag once wrote that to photograph is to appropriate. And honestly? That line hits differently when you think about queer bodies in post-socialist Yugoslavia.
Photography isn’t neutral. It never was.
Who gets photographed? Who is visible? Who controls the image? Those questions matter, especially in societies where queer people were pushed to the margins. In the 1990s Balkans, mainstream media rarely showed queer life — unless it was framed as scandal or deviance.
So when queer photographers documented their own communities, something shifted.
Sontag talks about how photographs shape reality rather than just reflect it. That’s exactly what happened here. The act of photographing queer people in nightclubs, apartments, protests — it wasn’t passive documentation. It was political.
The camera became a tool of survival.
But Sontag also warns us: looking can be a form of power. So we have to ask — who is behind the camera? Is it a queer insider? Or an outsider exoticizing?
In post-socialist contexts, this tension becomes even sharper. Western media often portrayed the Balkans as violent, backward, hyper-masculine. Queer photography disrupts that narrative. It complicates it. It says: yes, there is nationalism and war — but there is also softness, intimacy, glitter, and chosen family.
Photography doesn’t just show reality. It builds archives. And archives shape history.
Sontag helps us see that every image of a queer body in that time wasn’t accidental. It was loaded.
Looking is political. Being seen is political. And choosing how to be seen? That might be the most radical act of all.
