Picture Me: Presenting Queer Visual History

In their project, Picture Me, the authors engage with a burgeoning interest in queer Finnish history and with scholarship from the German tradition of visual history to consolidate a new research field called queer visual history. Each researcher in the project is working with a particular archival record, or records, associated with Finnish historical figures that are alleged to have lived queer lives. The shared concern is, to test what visual methods can do to enhance our historical analyses and, and to embrace the richness of the photographic archive for the ways in which it has been able to capture not just individuals’ stories, but the spaces in which they lived, the people who accompanied them, and even the perspectives with which they viewed their own lives.