ABSTRACT

This chapter considers imagination and photography as ways in which attention is transmuted into form through analysis of photographs of a gay rights rally held in Chicago in April 1970. Approaching attention through the ways of “looking” at its heart, it argues that photographs concern what happens in the scene of photography: the relation between the person with the camera who looks and the object at which that person looks. Imagination is conceived here as a form of visual relation, in which the concept of a mental image loosely corresponds to, and plays a role in, the genesis of the photographic image. Thus, the imaginative substrate of the scene of photography in which the photographs were produced is explored. Looking, moreover, was itself the subject of the Gay Liberation demonstration itself. That is, the demonstration aimed at making the gay community visible. Accordingly, the boundaries between the roles of onlookers, bystanders, and participants in the photographs appear fluid and provide a rich field in which to parse terms such as "watching," "witnessing," "bystanding," and "observing."