January 17th 2025 — It was one of those days when the deceptively clear sky allowed the morning sun to beam down onto the fresh January snow so bright it made the ice crystals glisten like stars in the New England sky. It was one of those days when the nearby Winchester High School students still hadn’t been let out, and a quiet peace shone across the adjacent Judkins Pond, where a nest of swans had made their home. Here, neatly tucked on the shore of the Aberjona River, stands the Griffin Museum of Photography, endearingly referred to as simply “the Griffin.” On January 17th, the museum opened with its newest exhibition: Nuclear Family. This project collaborated with numerous artists both domestically and internationally to explore themes of family and parenthood—highlighting these matters through a queer lens.
I was fortunate enough to view the pieces just before the official opening night, allowing me to take in each other the pieces in a state of seclusion and privacy. This time alone in the ornate building challenged me to authentically observe and deliberate each of the numerous astounding photographs placed around the museum’s three spaces.
After briefly speaking with and enjoying the company of Executive Director Crista Dix, I turned around and entered the main gallery space. Three purple walls welcomed me into the room, and I immediately felt a sense of unequivocal warmth.
In the center main gallery, the vivid pastels of Laurence Philomene’s monograph Puberty immediately welcome you into the space, a project exploring the multifaceted nature of transitioning. Philomene’s works, such as Angel Chimes (2021) and Daily Still Life/Bedside Table (2019), grant the viewers a small, unfiltered window into their life as a non-binary individual. Behind the pastels, themes of freedom and intimacy weaves together their pieces and add vibrancy to this exhibition.
On the main gallery’s walls, you can find numerous other projects, each observing queerness from each artist’s lens. What made this project so exceptional was having the opportunity to view how others interpret their queerness, each artist being vastly different from the prior.
Mengwen Cao’s Liminal Space centered on joy and connection in the queer Asian diaspora. In this project, they allow those photographed to express themselves in a genuine and all-encompassing way, placing the ideas of strife and struggles in the LGBTQ+ community on the back burner, allowing moments of unabashed delight to shine through. These photos—characterized by their shimmering and opalescent quality—radiate nothing less than charm.
Nearby hangs Jess T. Dugan’s Letter to My Daughter, a series dedicated to their own five-year-old Elinor. This project takes the form of a video featuring photographs that beautifully paint together both the zeniths and nadirs of parenthood as a queer person—touching upon topics such as the challenges of conception, adjusting to parenthood as a queer person, and love. The audio behind the video hit home for me, with Dugan reading aloud a letter that was written to their daughter. It was genuinely fascinating to see Dugan spotlight this theme, as family is often a contentious topic within the queer community, and Dugan’s spotlight allows for an open and honest conversation about how identity and parenthood intersect.
Adjacent to Dugan hangs prints created by artist Yorgos Efthymiadis in his collection The Lighthouse Keepers. His pastoral depictions of his seaside hometown in Greece perfectly mirror the recurrent metaphors of lighthouse keepers guiding queer folk through his quaint hometown. Fittingly, the marriage between home, identity, and community glows from his pieces.
Anne Vetter’s series love is not the last room that examines community on a familial level, utilizing their family as the models in their fascinating story. Observing everyday scenes through their gender-fluid lens, Vetter can accurately and meaningfully capture large swaths of family life, delicately subverting expectations.
What contextualizes these pieces? Matthew Leifheit’s Queer Archives series serve to document queer culture through its various movements throughout the 20th century, collecting and re-presenting materials that many major institutions would neglect. Leifheit’s archival work not only serves to question who is in charge of telling history but, in doing so, also keeps that same history alive. Leifheit’s series underscores a more significant issue within historical storytelling and keeps those silenced queer voices alive, a sight that was truly heartwarming to see. It’s stories like the one’s that Leifheit raises that provided me with a plethora of solace in my coming out, reminding the world that queer people have always been here and will always continue to be.
Moving out of the main gallery into the atelier gallery, I was greeted by artist Kevin Bennett Moore’s project Meditation in an Emergency. Moore, influenced by films of the mid-19th century and by their own experience as a queer individual, creates scenes that occupy a tangible and abstract space for the viewer. In essence, they are not the calm before the storm but rather the calm within the storm. The presentation of these pieces outside the main gallery serves to further isolate the works from those of the other artists and aids in driving home the themes Moore addresses.
Further on in the Griffin’s back gallery hangs the heartbreaking displays created by Matthew Finley in his series An Impossibly Normal Life, which follows his uncle Ken’s life as a queer man in the pre-1970s. Finley, who identifies as queer himself, reshaped his uncle’s life into something that didn’t focus on the shame of being LGBTQ+ but instead lived in an alternate reality where that same aspect was a social norm.
Adding a light shimmer over scenes of men acting in a way some would presume as ‘taboo,’ reshaping them into something positive was indeed a heartwarming and gut-wrenching experience. It’s challenging not to imagine what these men may have gone through, and Finley successfully achieves his goal of showing anyone “struggling with their identity what could have been and what could have been.” When exiting this portion of the gallery, I turned around to catch a last glimpse at the photos on the wall when a shimmer of sunlight gleamed through the window, making the whole room shimmer in a truly dazzling display. At this moment, I understood why the museum had hit so close to home.
As the United States continues to change, it was truly touching to be invited to a space celebrating queerness without remorse. Whether in Philomene’s vibrant prints, Vetter’s calm and present shots, or Finley’s sparkling and emotional displays, it was clear that these artists put time, thought, and care into each of their extraordinary displays. As a local queer teenager, it’s moving to see such a celebration of queer art and queer lives. Despite my lack of expertise in photography, it was evident that what these eight artists created was nothing short of passionate, evocative, and dazzling.
Willow Simon (b. June 28th, 2005) is a rising sophomore at Wesleyan University, currently majoring in English and History, and planning on minoring in Middle Eastern Studies. She specializes in journalism and creative writing and has a passion for working in audio.
Griffin Museum of Photography – Winchester, Massachusetts
The Griffin Museum @ Lafayette City Center Passageway – Boston, Massachusetts
