Latent Gestures: Autobiographical Perception and Queer Recognition in the South East Archive of Seaside Photography

This practice-based paper examines how embodied, queer and neurodivergent modes of perception shape the interpretation of photographic archives. Focusing on Latent: A Hidden History, a project developed through the South East Archive of Seaside Photography (SEAS), it explores how mid-twentieth-century seaside photographs, produced under the social and legal constraints of male homosexuality, can be reengaged through sustained acts of photographic looking. Rather than seeking explicit representations of queer identity, the project employs enlargement, cropping and close visual analysis to isolate subtle gestures of male proximity embedded within crowded public scenes. Drawing upon autobiographical experience as a queer and neurodivergent artist-researcher, the paper argues that embodied perception functions as a methodological resource rather than a subjective limitation. Queer experiential recognition, together with the sustained attentional patterns associated with ADHD, shapes how photographs are encountered, allowing fleeting gestures, mirrored stances, passing glances and men walking arm in arm to become perceptible while remaining ethically indeterminate. Rather than recovering hidden queer histories, the paper proposes a practice-based methodology foregrounding attentiveness, embodied looking and photographic process as ways of generating new forms of archival knowledge, demonstrating how photographic archives remain open to renewed acts of looking that expand, rather than resolve, the meanings they contain.