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Gwinnutt’s account of the period is infused with optimism, a mood that he describes was widely felt at the time. There is a powerful solidarity that resonates throughout the pages of the book, of friends, lovers and acquaintances united by their shared experiences. It is an important document of an era when queer culture and a wider creative scene empowered those who had formerly been repressed to no longer live in hiding, demonstrating to them and to a wider mainstream that there was no shame to be found in being gay. Last year, the National Portrait Gallery acquired twenty-one of the photographs featured in The White Camera Diaries, and exhibited them in a show titled Before We Were Men, timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality. The portraits come together as an alternative map of the city. Iconic clubs, from Blitz to Heaven, also feature. People mingled, and it was inspiring to be around them.” London itself is without doubt the unspoken backbone of the book amidst a glittering array of characters, and the exact street where a photograph was taken is recalled by Gwinnutt with dizzying accuracy: Roseberry Avenue, Fournier Street, Charing Cross Road.
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It was more focused, and it lingered in the mind for longer. Gwinnutt reflects on this when we speak briefly on the phone: “In the age of social media it’s different, and it’s easier to be well known, to get attention. This was the pre-digital era, when the locality of a place and the people in it really mattered, and a creative scene needed proximity to flourish. Other letters and assorted notes exchanged at the time feature in the book, which emphasize the tight-knit nature of these relationships. Sad and funny in equal measures, it includes such choice lines as “you are off your bonce”, “perhaps if I were Paul Getty the Second” and “try to practise the gentlemanly Act of Generosity.” I felt like he was snatching it from me.” Instead the young photographer stated that he would only part with it for the sum of one hundred pounds-“I was deluded because I still thought he was rich”-and a handwritten letter from Clarke in response is included. It caught me by surprise and I said ‘No’. “He liked it and said in a demanding kind of way that I should give it to him. He seemed sad.” Ossie Clark, 1984Īfter photographing Clark reading his book and taking a bath, Gwinnutt produced a print that the designer requested from him. The walls hadn’t been painted in a long time,” he recalls. He describes visiting the fashion designer Ossie Clark at his home, soon after their first meeting at a party in a Mayfair gallery. On meeting Derek Jarman for the first time, he writes “I wanted to photograph him and become his boyfriend or at least have sex with him.” His openness has a levelling effect, inviting us into the scene and reminding us that the glamour of a single image can often be misleading. We are given insight into the conversations and events that took place immediately before and after many of the photographs were taken, with Gwinnutt filling in some of the gaps that would otherwise be left blank. “I knew from a very early age I was attracted to men and that this was really bad, even criminal and possibly made me like those men you occasionally heard adults talk about in disgusted terms, but somehow I knew I wasn’t bad.” His recollections and candid reflections accompany his photographs of the period documented in the book, spanning 1980 to 1986.
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“Every kid searches for their identity, don’t they?” he writes in the introduction, looking back almost thirty years after these images were first taken. It is a life less ordinary to be found in these photographs, where the challenges (personal and political) of being openly gay are left unspoken but never far out of sight.Īll the images in The White Camera Diaries were taken when Gwinnutt was in his early twenties, a hopeful newcomer to London from Derbyshire. This is not a document of celebrity, although some of its faces were famous already at the time-older figures like Gilbert & George and Norman Rosenthal-but rather a diaristic insight into a tight-knit scene fighting to survive outside of the conventional expectations of society. Seen through Gwinnutt’s lens, the men come alive with their own frustrations and desires, anxieties and aspirations, as they begin to make their way as artists, film directors, fashion designers and writers.