“It took a lot to get here,” says Quil Lemons over video chat. He’s enjoying the final days of a vacation in Cape Cod, a week out from his opening of Quiladelphia at Hannah Traore Gallery. “It’s so nice to finally be at the point where we’re getting ready to share it with everyone,” he continues. “It’s just been a lot of unlearning, and understanding my position — what it means to me to be a photographer and an artist, and what that means to other people.”
Balancing that tension between critical reception and his own artistic vision has become more urgent over the last few years, as his list of accomplishments has grown longer. Having worked with the top stars across fashion, music and entertainment — like Lorde, Telfar Clemens, Naomi Campbell and Billie Eilish — and being featured in the seminal photography book The New Black Vanguard, in 2021 he became the youngest photographer to shoot the cover of Vanity Fair.
He’s deeply grateful, and aware that “this isn’t really something that happens for people that look like me,” but moving into the future, he’s hoping to break free from discourse to focus more intentionally on his message and craft.
“I’m really thinking about being really present in my work, and not carrying so much the weight of being a Black man, the weight of being a gay man, the weight of being 26, the weight of former success. I had to remove myself, to then find myself. I think that everybody does that as you’re growing.”
Looking back at his formative years in South Philadelphia, Quil reflects that his earliest experiences wielding a camera involved turning the lens on those closest to him, namely the women in his family. “I think that I’ve always seen so much power in femininity,” he says. “Masculinity is something that I’ve always been like — what the fuck is going on here?”
Quiladelphia is a continuation of the operative question that inspired Glitter Boy, the 2017 photography series that first garnered major attention for his work. That question was: “What is masculinity?”
Glitter Boy captured portraits of young queer men embracing liberation beyond gendered notions of how they should present themselves. This new exhibition, he says, “is way more nuanced. It’s honesty, it’s radical love.” He was interested in exploring sexuality and desire, on a deeper level. “I wanted to be more direct with this. This time it’s right in your face.”
“I was thinking about my desire, and about intimacy, queer intimacy. It’s not just limited to just the Black body. Of course, I think about being a Black queer man, because I look in the mirror and I know what I see. But I don’t think that my desire is limited to that. What you’re attracted to, your sexuality, can go completely against everything that you stand for and I think that’s the really interesting part about making things that are a little bit kinky.”
In order to really delve into kink, Quil shares he had to push past engrained feelings of shame. “When I thought about putting it out,” he says, “I was like, oh my God. My dad is Muslim, and my mom is really Christian — full-on church girl. I have very agnostic spiritual beliefs and I don’t really adhere to any organized religion, but I could not escape that shame of being ‘naughty’. I had to get over that fear.”
Quil’s work stands in a decades-long lineage of queer photography, but he specifically references being inspired by Peter Hujar, who died of AIDs before receiving widespread recognition for his body of work. “I feel like we lost a group of people who would have been mentors and would have made this so much easier,” Quil says of carrying on in their legacy. “People always say, my God, you’re so brave. You’re so free. I don’t think when people say that they really understand the negotiations I have to go through.”
It’s why, with this project, he’s set out to develop his own his own mythology. He asked himself: “What is a Quil Lemons photograph? What does it mean? I am so sick of people telling me who I should be that I was like, we’re gonna completely disrupt that.”
That is part of the reason he decided, for a few of his subjects, to collaborate with friends who are also sex workers. “I feel like OnlyFans was the first time I saw Black creators have full control. They don’t have to interface with any of the negativity, they can turn it off. They can turn it on. They can choose when they want to do. People always look down upon sex work, and I think that it’s some of the most important work in our society.”
Quil’s hope is that by embracing his own truth more faithfully, his work will invite others to follow. “If I exist even more radically gay, I think that it’ll allow other people to do the same,” he says. He envisions a future where “people won’t be killed for voguing,” referring to O’Shae Sibley, a young gay man who was fatally stabbed for dancing to Beyonce. “Maybe people will just feel safer to wear makeup, to do anything.”
He wants us to embrace complexity, to make space for our truest selves. “I just don’t want this whole thing to be about nudity, that’s such a reduction,” he clarifies. “It’s not gonna be easy for you to come in and understand the show. You’re really gonna have to sit with yourself.”
‘Quil Lemons: Quiladelphia’ is on show at Hannah Traore Gallery until 4 November.
Credits
All images courtesy of the artist