Queer Bodies, Queer Communities: Photography and Belonging in Upstate New York

Photography has long been a way for queer communities to recognize one another, build connections, imagine futures, and preserve histories that might otherwise be overlooked. Join CPW featured photographers Luis Manuel Diaz, Morgan Gwenwald, Meryl Meisler, and Kate Warren for a conversation moderated by Anna Conlan, Director of The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, about image-making as an act of belonging. Through portraits, documentary work, and personal narratives, these artists explore how photographs can document and foster intimacy, chosen family, community building, and the many forms queer culture takes in the Hudson Valley region and beyond.

Anna Conlan is the Neil C. Trager Director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, New York. A curator and art historian with over twenty years of experience, she has held roles at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Museum for African Art in New York. At The Dorsky, she has curated numerous exhibitions, including Life After the Revolution: Kate Millett’s Art Colony for Women. She was also a curatorial consultant and catalog author for the award-winning Art After Stonewall: 1969–89. Her research on queer feminist cultural history has been published in Feminist Theoryjournal and Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Leeds and Columbia University. 

Luis Manuel Diaz is a Mexican-born visual artist working with photography. Drawing from personal history as an entry point, his work traces the internal and external consequences of migration. With a view camera, he examines the construction of self, space, and history to uncover the unseen infrastructures that shape both body and land. Working between rural Michoacán, Mexico, and the suburbs of New York, his practice considers how landscapes and domestic interiors function as living archives of memory, labor, and belonging.

Morgan Gwenwald is one of a small group of out Lesbian photographers who emerged during the early days of the women’s/gay rights movements. Her work has been featured on many book covers and in publications. She exhibits her work locally and internationally including in Art After Stonewall, and Images On Which to Build: 1970s – 1990s and the Upstate Photography Biennial. They strive to capture the community in which they live in honest and loving detail. Her move to New York in 1979 started a long-term relationship with the Lesbian Herstory Archives where they still serve as a coordinator. Early on she took up the challenge of portraying the diversity of Lesbian sexuality. Her work was featured in the first and subsequent issues of On Our Backs.

Meryl Meisler (b. 1951, The Bronx) grew up on Long Island. Inspired by her father's family albums and Diane Arbus, she discovered photography as her medium at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With compassion and humor, she has built a visual memoir—begun in 1973 and continuing today—that captures unguarded joy amid adversity. After coming out as a lesbian in 1975, she moved to New York City to study with Lisette Model, immersing herself in the queer-friendly disco scene and documenting its nightlife. Following 31 years teaching art in NYC public schools, she began sharing her vast archive—work infused with a sense of place, humanity, and a distinctly queer eye with a Jewish sense of humor. Now in her seventies and working again with analog film and darkroom printing, her ongoing series, Queer Friendly Nightlife Now, honors resilient, defiant communities burning bright in a changing world. She is represented by CLAMP in New York and Polka Galerie in Paris. 

Kate Warren is a photography-based queer artist, educator, and community organizer. Raised in Vermont and based in the Hudson Valley, her work explores self-performance, kinship, and intimacy as sites of resistance to inherited structures of repression. Drawing on archival materials, constructed scenes, and sculptural interventions, she reimagines personal and collective histories through a queer, feminist lens, making memory porous, speculative, and alive.She has exhibited at venues including Light Work, the California Museum of Photography, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and has been recognized by American Photography, the Lucie Foundation, and the British Journal of Photography. 

Working in collaboration with partners including Planned Parenthood, the Smithsonian, and The New York Times, she brings a trauma-informed approach to image-making. 

Her practice extends beyond image-making to build interdependent creative communities rooted in mutual aid, including the Golden Kin artist retreat and Photo Buddies salon series in Hudson, NY.

Banner image © Morgan Gwenwald.