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 For an Australian art photographer, having a monograph published is a rare honour, one bestowed last month on Ray Cook, whose work has never shied away from the queer and subversive.
The title, Diary of a Fortunate Man, is an apt one given that the Brisbane-based Cook, now 44, had studied neither art nor photography when a friend asked him to work in his darkroom back in the late ’80s.
“I almost feel I accidentally fell into the whole thing, but I’m very glad I did,” Cook told Queensland Pride.
“I enjoyed the chemistry in the darkroom. I was also taking cameras home and getting friends together and acting out goofy stories over a few drinks. I quickly started to realise I could develop a political voice as well,” he says.
Cook says his work has always been about the experience of being a gay man in Western culture.
“I was telling my own experiences through allegory, translating events from the literal into something more allegorical.”
Staying closeted was “never an option”, he says.
 “When I started it was the time of the emergence of HIV and everyone was gearing up for decriminalisation. There was a sense of urgency there. It was the post-Joh era and in a sense we were alienated by the blatant corruption that was going on. It united a whole lot of subcultures. It didn’t matter so much that you might have been gay or lesbian or whatever. We were all in it together. I think it’s a uniquely Queensland thing and it has flavoured Queensland cultural practice ever since.”
While themes around HIV played a leading role in Cook’s early work, today he has turned his attention to the relationship between gay men and popular culture, which is also the subject of his PhD thesis.
“I’m playing with work that comes from gay male imagery and culture before Stonewall,” Cook explains. “We have an image of gay people pre-Stonewall as sad and lonely, but if you look at the history of the cultural output it’s prodigious. Sad and lonely people don’t do that. There have always been these fabulous codes and protocols that have operated beyond the detection of the enemy. I’m trying to see camp from a different political contest – codes that try to stay one step ahead. Sometimes, I think that in contemporary culture we give away a little too much.”
Cook has long drawn on the gay past to illustrate the gay present. “My work is low-tech, craft-high. It’s very much in the tradition of old gay photography pre-Stonewall. It follows along conceptually and aesthetically from [Baron] Von Gloeden and the 19th Century Romantics through to the beefcake photography of the ’40s and ’50s, but it has always taken a sort of subversive rather than kitschy stance,” he says.
Launched last month at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography, Diary of a Fortunate Man includes lush reproductions of Cook’s work over the past 20 years. Its publication was made possible through the Queensland Centre for Photography, where Cook is a lecturer, and a grant from Arts Queensland.
The book is likely to help Cook build an international reputation, which will also receive a boost in January when his work will be exhibited in Los Angeles.
“We look like having four destinations in the US: LA, Miami, New York and San Francisco. And we’re also exhibiting at the big photo fair in Paris. I’m trying to be a bit more professional – without selling out – and getting some recognition elsewhere.”
We can only wish him every success. After all, as Cook himself says, “I’ve never had another job. This is all I know how to do!”
Diary of a Fortunate Man is out now.
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