Volcano has been photographing queer lives and communities for more than four decades, and this exhibition concentrates on work made between 1982 and 1995. These are intimate photographs, sometimes playful, sometimes confrontational, documenting friends, lovers, performers and activists from within the communities themselves rather than as an outsider looking in.
The first room has a particularly strong Edinburgh connection, with previously unseen photographs made during Volcano’s time in the city with their Scottish lover, Sylvia MacFarlane. There are images of graveyards, the Highlands and domestic interiors. They have the feel of private memories being opened up to public view, which gives them an immediacy that a more formal photographic record might lack.
One image particularly stayed with me: a kind of visual network showing connections between different people. I assumed those connections might be sexual, although I may be wrong about that. Either way, it made me think of Eminem’s Patchwork Quilt — that idea of relationships and connections spreading out across a web of people. The difference here was that there didn’t seem to be a single central node. Instead, the connections ran between different individuals in a much less hierarchical way. I found myself standing in front of it for quite a while, tracing the lines and thinking about what they might represent.
Elsewhere the emphasis shifts towards queer identity, sexuality and BDSM culture. Some of the images are explicit — there is nude photography and bondage — but they never struck me as simply there to provoke. What comes across more strongly is a sense of people asserting ownership of their bodies, their sexuality and the way they choose to present themselves.
It is also worth remembering the period in which much of this work was made. These photographs come from a time when openly challenging conventional ideas about gender and sexuality could carry considerably greater personal and social consequences than it does today. That gives the work an added historical weight.
You can see the whole exhibition without devoting a large part of your day to it, which is actually one of its strengths. Drop in, spend some time with the photographs and then head back into the madness of festival Edinburgh. It costs nothing, it offers a glimpse into a world and a period that were rarely recorded from the inside, and it is certainly worth a visit.
Del LaGrace Volcano: Love Bites Back
Edinburgh Art Festival ’26
14–30 August 2026
Open daily, 10am–5pm
Free
