Pierre Dalpé says the sensation was overwhelming. It was the summer of 1992, and he was attending his first Wigstock, the legendary New York drag festival. “The energy I felt in that park as I approached, the way it intensified as I became enveloped by the crowd and the thumping music from the stage,” he recalls, “the park seemed to act like a magnet attracting the fiercest, most creative, and fabulous people from New York City and beyond. It was its own unique queer universe.”
Dalpé, then a student majoring in film studies and minoring in photography at Concordia University in Montreal, decided right away that he wanted to capture images of the festival. Wigstock, which began in 1984 and continued until 2005, before being resurrected in 2018, was crucial in highlighting influential drag acts, including Lady Bunny, RuPaul, and Lypsinka. But while many docs have captured the performances that drew crowds at Wigstock, Dalpé decided to focus on the audiences that gathered, rather than the performers.
“I’ve never been a big fan of creating ‘performer on stage’ images,” Dalpé explains. “Given the choice, I’d much rather take a photograph of the performer backstage, looking directly at the camera, or looking at the camera via the make-up mirror. At Wigstock, if I had stood near the stage and photographed only the performers, I would have ended up with performance photos.”
And those kinds of photos, Dalpé correctly points out, have been captured many times by different photographers.
“I much prefer roaming around in the crowd and interacting with the participants,” he says. “This gives me much more control over the final results and I’m able to direct people, if need be, and also get up close to them and have them look directly at me, or directly into the camera, which ultimately creates what I feel is a more powerful image.”
Dalpé attended Wigstock for three years in the early Nineties and has pored over the hundreds of shots he took to assemble his favourites into a book, Wigstock 1992 – 1995 (Les Éditions Cayenne). For the photographer, it is a nostalgic look back at his tours of Wigstock. It is just as much the culmination of his decades working as a queer photographer, rendering a body of work that explores issues surrounding gender and identity.
In 1990, while Dalpé was attending Concordia, he embarked on his first photographic series in which he took before and after photos of his friends in and out of drag. “I really began thinking about gender binaries, gender-bending and how much clothing has to do with, or not to do with, gender. I read Marjorie Garber’s book Vested Interests and that led me to the work of Judith Butler and Esther Newton. These books were full of ideas about theory, gender, drag and identity. I realized how malleable and fluid gender is, that it isn’t predetermined for anyone.”
The books Dalpé read and events he covered expanded into his first photography series, Clothes Minded, which captured tens of his friends and colleagues in and out of drag. At the same time, Dalpé was expanding his work, shooting backstage at drag events in gay clubs and bars in Montreal. “I had always been drawn to documentary images and to documentary film. I was getting an exhilarating charge from documenting events I was already attending. The people and events that surrounded me, including the Montreal Pride events, that meant something to me, became my subjects.”
Looking at Dalpé’s own evolution as an artist feels like watching so much of queer culture shift, from cultural, political, and distinctly personal vantage points. Dalpé and I met while we were both enrolled in a film aesthetics class at Concordia; we have stayed in touch since, often attending the same parades, rallies, and parties, covering them for various alternative publications. We’ve both been based in Montreal but have spent a good deal of time in New York, watching the east-coast queer scene develop and morph.
What strikes Dalpé most about looking back at this time was that the more things change outfits, the more they stay the same. “Probably my earliest memory of a drag show is around 1984. My boyfriend had a cousin who was doing drag, so we went to see him perform. It was a seedy bar on St. Catherine Street in the east before that officially became the city’s gay village. What intrigued me most was the seediness of the bar, which I loved. This was before the mainstreaming of drag, before RuPaul’s Drag Race, before Mado’s Cabaret. At that point, experiencing a drag show meant being in a divey place. This, in itself, was exciting and intriguing. I felt like I was entering into more of a forbidden or underground world than if I was simply going to a gay disco or nightclub.”
What Dalpé was witnessing—and what was inspiring him and informing his creative work—was the seismic shift being felt in the drag scene and its burgeoning popularity. “Prior to the ’80s, the type of drag and camp I had experienced was in mainstream culture, like Flip Wilson, Liberace, David Bowie, and Boy George. As well, of course, as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I had seen many times by 1984. But these examples don’t quite compare to seeing a drag performance in a gay setting: experiencing the bitchy, raunchy, witty, ironic, self-deprecating humour of a drag performer in a setting amongst your queer peers is very specific and energizing. There was great humour in it and a lot of catharsis.”
Something that has always struck me about Dalpé’s work is that much of his drag portraiture is captured in black and white (b&w). This seems strange, given that the make-up and clothing is so colourful. “There was a convenience to working in black and white,” he explains. “I had access to darkrooms at Concordia and dealing with the b&w film development and printing was and still is much easier than colour. It was cheaper for me to develop my films at Concordia, as well as make contact sheets.”
But Dalpé was also drawn to b&w film imagery because of so many of his major influences. “Most of the luminaries in photography worked in b&w, in particular Diane Arbus. It was an established aesthetic which in the past was still taken more seriously. And when one starts working, shooting, printing in b&w, one develops a deep appreciation for how beautiful a nicely printed b&w image can be. You can also more easily control the tones in an image and don’t have to worry about balancing the colour. My creative eye was already accustomed and attuned to the b&w aesthetic, so all of these factors contributed to that choice. And I don’t regret it at all. I find the b&w aesthetic lends the images a timeless, classic quality. But there were people photographing and videotaping in colour, so there exists a parallel universe of Wigstock images in colour.”
Dalpé’s choice of lens also proved crucial: “When I am shooting, the surrounding environment is almost as important to capture as the main subjects. For Wigstock, I chose to photograph with a slightly wide-angle lens so that I would be able to capture more than just the one or more person that was posing for me. I like capturing the happenstance of what might be transpiring in the peripheries. Sometimes it’s only afterwards, when I’m looking over my contact sheets, that I’ll notice something interesting—an added element that I captured in the background that I may not have noticed in the instant I took the photo. Looking at my contact sheets afterwards can make for unexpected surprises.”
Dalpé says there was something almost addictive about photographing an event as electrifying as Wigstock. While he was there, he knew history was bending. “Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Photographing within a dynamic environment such as Wigstock is a real adrenaline rush. I have a similar sensation when I’m photographing backstage. My senses are on overload, trying to decide who and what to photograph, while also trying to keep all the technical and aesthetic photographic aspects in check. It would leave me exhausted, after about five or six hours of non-stop photographing, but it was an exhaustion well worth the effort.”
