‘The world wasn’t ready for me’: Del LaGrace Volcano on photographing queer subcultures and identity

Del LaGrace Volcano, the US photographer famed for bold images of LGBTQ+ communities, drag kings, and sexual desire, has called the quiet Swedish city of Örebro home for two decades. They moved there with their former partner, Matilda Wurm, a university associate professor. Their current life—forest walks and trips to the swimming pool with their two children—contrasts sharply with their past in London, where they lived in squats, attended S&M fetish parties, and documented lesbian cruising culture.

Volcano, now 68, identifies as intersex and calls themself a “hermaphrodyke,” but says they now “pass as apparently a little old man.” Raised as a girl, they were given an unwanted breast implant and told to live as a woman. In the 1990s, a girlfriend encouraged them to stop plucking facial hair, leading to their embrace of intersex identity and the iconic “Self Portrait with Blue Beard” (1995).

Much early press was sneering. Volcano feels “the world wasn’t ready” for them, and they are tired of their identity being debated rather than their technically brilliant photographs. Their series “Queer Dyke Cruising” and “Love Bites” were influential but controversial—the latter briefly banned by US Customs. Despite fame, Volcano seeks financial validation. At 65, they felt like a failure through a heteronormative capitalist lens. After surviving the age their mother died (67), they have new vigor. A major summer exhibition will take place at Auto Italia in London and the Edinburgh art festival.

Volcano wants their subjects to feel seen and cared for, a corrective to their own childhood. Their parents divorced early, shuttling between their mother’s hippie household in California and their father’s strict Mormon home in Oklahoma. Both parents had same-sex affairs, but their mother was unsupportive of Volcano’s bisexuality. Despite calling their mother a “pathological liar,” they miss her greatly.

Living in Örebro isn’t always easy—it’s “not a queer city”—but Volcano takes pride in its beauty. Daily forest walks make it bearable. They plan to write a memoir but need “some people to die, some people to grow up, and statutes of limitations to expire.” Currently, they focus on building a “Queer Archive of Resistance” and dream of a compound in Sweden where people can visit to study their work and have conversations.