Is There a ‘Queer Eye’?
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            The book is arranged along six themes titled “Icons,” “Staged,” “Body,” “Liberty,” “Making a Scene,” and “Beyond the Frame.” The expected luminaries are included, among them George Platt Lynes (Nude Boy from 1937), Pierre et Gilles (Le Mystère de l’Amour from 1991), Ruth Bernhard (In the Box from 1962), and Andy Warhol (the Sticky Fingers album cover from 1971). But there are also images I had never laid eyes on before. Eddie Squires’ series of scrapbook photos and various other ephemera from 1975 to ’77 offer distinct glimpses of cruisy London. It’s a pleasing time warp into pre-AIDS gay urban culture “compiled with love by a gay science fiction fan.”

      This volume also makes space for chapters focussing on specific artists. The London-based photographer Sunil Gupta’s images of New York in the 1970s are highlighted. One appears to show a couple out for an afternoon stroll; others have a far more sexual vibe. In an interview, Gupta recalls: “The great thing about New York City was that every street corner was different, so it was very exciting. One day I realized that Christopher Street was kind of my tribe. I was going there all the time because I’d never seen so many gay men in public in the daytime before, so I began to photograph them to the point where it superseded the other streets.”

            The trans photographer Cassils is also featured, giving space to their transgressive, arresting images of naked trans bodies. Cassils discusses the complexities and contradictions inherent in the increased visibility of trans people: “This idea that representation is enough is just not the case. It stems from a sort of fascist ideology where you give people the power to have this idea of representation and freedom, yet at the same time don’t give them their rights; there is a sense of agency that doesn’t hold true. Visibility is made all the more dangerous in a world of heightened polemics and polarization. The more you make yourself visible, the more you make yourself vulnerable.”

            With a keen eye to history, the book is punctuated by a chapter (“Beyond the Frame”) that analyzes experimental work. “Experimental techniques have allowed artists to break out of the confines of photographic representation and empowered them to ascribe their own subjective meaning to the works they create,” Kaluznick writes in her preface to the chapter. These more unusual images demonstrate “a refusal to conform to aesthetic models or be restricted by notional ideas of what a photograph is and can be.” It’s a fitting conclusion to the book, a nod to future possibilities for the queer community and for challenging forms of art that lie ahead.

            Calling the Shots is at once playful, engaging, humorous, poignant, and painful. This is a book that is both desirable and vitally necessary in a world where certain conservative forces are again ascendant and eager to render us invisible. Each page feels like a welcome act of defiance.