Same Difference

‘Same Difference’ was the title of the first queer photography exhibition that I was involved with, both as exhibitor and as organiser, alongside Jean Fraser. It took place at Camerawork, London in 1986. We had both emerged from the time when photography education had just begun to embrace theory. The dominant discourse was “difference”. The difference, of course, was gender based which the two of us had applied to our respective queer experiences as lesbian and gay. However, it seemed inadequate to conceptualise same-sex desire so we called our project “Same Difference” to complicate the discourse. Because Camerawork was also a darkroom resource, we ran a parallel schools workshop with the blessing of the Inner London Education Authority. We selected exhibition work by photographers who openly identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual, but who didn’t necessarily share our theoretical bias. Some came directly from the larger queer community and were self-taught in the craft of photography. The gallery exhibition ran without problems, but the schools workshop got caught up in the preamble to Clause 28. This resulted in the cancellation the touring exhibition planned for schools comprising of teenage coming out storyboards from the workshop.