‘The female gaze interested me more': the radical vision of Dona Ann McAdams

For photographer Dona Ann McAdams, the personal is political. She's captured her community's history from the gay liberation movement and the performance art scene of the 1980s and 90s to the many intellectual and artistic individuals she met throughout the decades. Black Box brings together these striking historical images, taken between 1974 and 2024, with personal reflections that read like prose poems. Black Box: A Photographic Memoir is published by Saint Lucy Books. All quotes by McAdams
Over the decades McAdams has brought photography into small, underserved communities, everywhere from the South Bronx to southern Appalachia, empowering people in adult homes, shelters, mountain towns and horse tracks to take and make their own photographs
Since 1975 McAdams has used a Leica M2 to witness and shape the world around her. She once called herself a 'collage artist who works with time and light' and her dedication to analogue photography is matched by her commitment to community
'Every year for Pride we met in front of [the studio space] PS122 and wandered up Fifth Avenue. We had no particular destination, just the chance to celebrate who we were and what we believed in. But that year there was a profound shift in the parade. It seemed that corporate America had decided to cash in on all things gay and everyone was part of some commodified group. We all noticed it. The labels. At one point Lori said: 'Why can't we all just be generic queers?' She grabbed a paper flyer from her pocket and drew the sign. It happened that quickly: Generic Queer'
'Men looked at us. And when they looked at us we were supposed to look away or down. Those were the rules. Pretend they weren't looking, lower your eyes, let their gaze run over you. Don't look back. But I couldn't help myself, I always looked back. Straight in their eye until they did or said something stupid like: 'What are you looking at?' or 'Who the fuck do you think you are?' Often they just looked away. People would say: 'Don't do that!' or 'You clean up nice,' or 'You should wear dresses more often''
'I wanted to be invisible, free to move around, unseen. Free to do the looking. As long as I can remember, I was fascinated by how women presented themselves in public. The dresses and makeup and all the women stuff I didn't understand – how people looked at them and they looked away. Everyone knew about the male gaze, but the female gaze interested me more. Women looked at women all the time. And not just a certain kind of woman, but all kinds of women. Every one of them. I photograph women because I love them and happen to be one'
'I drove across the country with Yvonne and Lesley to photograph nuclear power plants. I had an idea, and learned to juggle for a photograph I wanted to make in front of a nuke. It would have something to do with human error and balance, juggling our genes. We'd planned our outfits in advance. I gave the prepared camera to Yvonne's father, and cued him. The light was perfect that winter afternoon. Coastal Florida light. Yvonne's on the left. Lesley's on the right. I'm the one in the middle'
'You'd see him all the time in the early 1990s at Planned Parenthood or pro-choice rallies, with a pocket full of pink foetuses – plastic, thumb-sized – handing them out to whoever would take them, though no-one did. I knew his name but didn't want to ever say it. He surfaced again with gusto during the Trump years, with his MAGA hats and creepy theatrics, which finally landed him in hot water. On 18 December 2022, the Vatican finally defrocked him for 'persistent disobedience' and 'blasphemy.' I can finally say his name now. I choose not to'
'Somehow this image got on Facebook as a meme, cropped to better feature the two little stars in the Plaza Real [now Plaza Mayor] in Madrid, skirts blowing up like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. I always thought it was cheesy, but others did not. It's my most recognised photograph, not because of me, but because of its life in an alternate universe. Sometimes people send it to me in its various forms and say: 'You should sue!' Sue who? I really don't mind its popularity. I kind of like it. If only they would just give me a photo credit'
In the afterword to Black Box, Joanna Howard writes: 'McAdams is famous for her uncanny ability to be at the right place at the right time to document resistance, protest and empowered agency across four or five decades of American culture'
'People were dying of Aids and Bush was doing nothing about it. I needed perspective, height, to look down on the protest coffins. I shimmied up a lamp-post, the way we did in high school gym with the rope. A man in the crowd holding a makeshift coffin looked up at me and said: 'Be careful'. I later learned the man was Assotto Saint, The Haitian-born performer, editor, poet and Aids activist. I wanted to send him a print of the photo, but I found out that he died of Aids in 1994. He was 36 years old'
Poet and writer Eileen Myles says: 'I feel wonder, sadness, delight, awe, tenderness, envy, to name a few of the ways I am meeting up with Dona Ann McAdams' astonishingly rich and utopian army of small moments alongside her elegant and swift kind of poem-notes that muse alongside these photographs. Speaking of eyes, I can't over-state my gratitude for Dona Ann McAdams. She's really got a pair.' An accompanying exhibition will open at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York on 17 April 2025

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