The way a community comes to know itself and be known is due in large part to the commitment of its faithful documentarians—those who bear witness to intimacies that play out over time. Three decades and counting, Jamie James has navigated the formation and shifting ground of Sydney’s queer communities, camera in hand as a horny cornucopia of shy extroverts take centerstage. Observe in Jamie’s photogenic universe how time melts past/future configurations into a continuous, ever-stretching present. 

An active performer and participant, Jamie recedes into the background as any good documentary photographer should. But what unfolds here is a portrait of Jamie as much as it is a mirror of the life and times of many others. Jamie retains a powerful and caring presence as a chronicler of love and loss within chosen family structures that play out against rapid social and cultural change. 

Scripted by desire and consent, the peep show is a lesson in the erotics of power, tacit transactions, and the politics of play. An encounter with Jamie’s pictures is an invitation to come closer and surrender will to vision as affective intensities break down and dissolve self, other, kin and lover. More than 80 carefully selected photographs from 1994 to 2024 comprise the living bodily archive of Peep Show at 107 Projects on Gadigal Country. In all its life-affirming and visceral glory, Peep Show is an intimate time machine of ephemeral action, gesture, and play – a remembrance of flesh and connection.

Daniel Mudie Cunningham: You have deep care and connection to your subjects which in some ways is contrary to documentary photography. 

Jamie James: It’s a bind. Let me tell you.

DMC: You’re a participant in the community that you’re documenting, so there’s a beautiful intimacy that comes through. How did you start out? 

JJ: Long story short, I grew up in First Nations communities on Bundjalung country from my early teens. When I was about 15, I got gifted a camera and I remember being with an Auntie (who recently passed). I said, “Can I take your picture?” And she said, “No,” and I was like, “Oh.” She said, “You can make it with me. Let’s make one together.” 

If you want the defining moment that as a young person made me think about how always I make work and even the language around making work, that was it. It has to be always with. Make, not take.

Because I was living regularly outside of my own bio family, I started documenting a community essentially in a culture that I didn’t understand, it was my way of helping me record learning. At the time, I was just snapping portraits, birthdays, funerals, and all the stuff that was happening around me which was the platform for telling stories, and being invited in.  I guess for me that was foundational.

And then work-wise, the only job I’ve had aside from freelancing was working in professional photo labs with photographers here and in London. Those jobs gave me the chance to shoot a lot of expensive film because we could knock it off the back of the Kodak and the Fuji trucks when they came to deliver. Back then in the early nineties, slide film was 35 bucks a roll. I also got staff discounts; I didn’t thieve everything! But I could photograph three or four nights a week. I taught myself how to tame slide film, and I loved it the most because it felt the closest to cinema and the closest to the richness of what I wanted to say. Like how to keep a moment moving with light and colour.

DMC: Did you ever present your work as slideshows? I’m thinking about artists like Nan Goldin or William Yang who are known for their use of the format. 

JJ:  When I was a baby butch lab rat, I used to process William’s film, and we’d have chats back then. From 2006-2013 I co-produced Cross Projections with Roslyn Sharp. That event was slideshows of documentary photography.

Yes, I love the slideshow format. I’ve been a bit obsessed by Nan Goldin’s work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-1996), which I saw when it showed at the MCA in the mid-nineties, that work was/is significant.

DMC: Slide shows are like peep shows… 

JJ:  Peep Show is a continuation of my book Humans Being (Clouds of Magellan Press, 2021), but I tried to not select much performance work for the exhibition. It is where some of my strongest images are, in queer performance documentation. I’ve tried to edit a kind of performative flow throughout the selection. I’ve tried to grow it from portraits, intimacies, and then more pervy stuff leading into a curtained adults-only area. It’s not even… I mean, what’s explicit? You get a bit desensitised. I’ve been exposed to lots of assholes and other things!

DMC: You’ve touched on the selection process for Peep Show, which sounds like it was built from a very complex and intricate criteria tied to relationships and inclusivity, among other things. 

JJ: Yeah, exactly. Friends, lovers, memory. I went down a deep – not dark – but a light well. Right down. So, my process occurs physically in my very small office and on my very big bed, and it was about going: “All right, don’t go to the easy stuff on hard drives yet.” I’m not badly organised for a sloppy photographer. I just started pulling my archive boxes out. I’m pretty across what’s in there, but had to revisit 14 stacked archive boxes full of film that is relatively ordered with a different narrative in mind. I looked at everything labeled queer, and then through all my First Nations work.

 I love the weaving of the two. And I burnt my retinas out on the lightbox. I had a really good look at everything.

When I move away from the queer performance document, which I’ve paid so much attention to, I have this other ongoing, quite photo-biographical narrative, which is just my life.  What’s precious to me is the intimacy. It’s the exchange and it’s the respect, and it’s to know that I can put images on the wall that I made in the mid-nineties and that those people will probably come and have a look if they’re able. I’ve asked consent as much as I could track people back down again, which is also a minefield.

DMC: How do you navigate consent?

JJ: A lot of my work’s really close. I want to smell it. I want to be in the orgy, for fuck’s sake. It’s not fun just to watch. I want to be in it. But I wasn’t sure whether for this show, I give myself an out and see what comes back and just trust all the times I’ve asked for consent and all the implied consent. I try and do it as well as I can. Some people have said to me clearly in the past, “Jamie, whatever you want to do is fine. I trust you.” Trust is crucial. There is a point where I must let my rope out a bit because it’s stifling. If I want to be able to have the freedom to explore the archives the way I imagined in my head, then that is kind of an inhibitor. But, yeah, it’s a fine line in the way I step, because a lot of people I have ongoing personal relationships with. Close or regular, that’s just the nature of a small town.

DMC: With the decision to sidestep your performance photography, what kind of performance is happening in the photos? I mean, there’s still a sense of people performing for the camera.

JJ: Absolutely. And I think that’s about the intimacy of the exchange and the dialogue that happens at the time. It is a performative kind of community – generous, kinky and fetishy. My archive wasn’t always performance. It’s about the transcendence of that, it’s about the people. For every iconic piss shot say of Glitta [Supernova], there are half a dozen really beautiful shots just before in the dressing room, and then just after with Berocca piss everywhere. I love the whole thing. Performance is so sensory. It taught me access and how to be present and invisible at the same time.

DMC: What’s great about that tension between presence and absence is seeing how you are gently tapping on that door and becoming the performer as well as the photographer – as in your recent appearance at the revival of cLUB bENT at Performance Space’s Liveworks in October 2023.

JJ: You get bored after a while, doing one thing. When I was in high school, I was like, “Well, I’m going to be an actor.” But I just wanted to be able to manifest story. At this point in my mid-fifties, I’m ready for that challenge. I feel quite confident in that. I feel like I understand because of all the performance I’ve watched, photographed, and been exposed to. Yes, I want to perform. Yes, my photos are performative. Yes, I want to make them sing off the wall and be their own performance. And I want the people in them to also feel really valued, and the viewer too.

DMC: You’ve been doing this for over 35 years now. Such a rich archive is the outcome of your remarkable commitment to practice. Technology has shifted so much over that time, from an analogue to a digital landscape. Intersecting with that timeline is a shifting landscape of identity politics and what it means to be queer today, which is different to what it was 35 years ago. So, you’ve got the technologies of your practice shifting at the same time as language around gender, sexuality, and identity politics changes.

JJ: Like a buckled train track, isn’t it? Those parallel lines don’t often meet, although they come together sometimes.

DMC: Do you think your practice documents that evolution over time? 

JJ: Potentially. I could go into this archive and select images that would purely hold up that kind of thread. But I feel like I am so present and there’s been so much joy and so much generosity in queer spaces that it just feels like an ongoing, evolving gift. I feel very lucky that as a teenager I had the privilege to choose this path. I’ve never done anything else. I grew with my camera, and even the types of gear that I’ve had and been able to afford over time grew with me. I photographed for years with a little old Nikon. That’s all I had and I loved it. Nothing professional, just a sharp lens and my knowledge of film. Most of my work from around 1993 to 2000 was made with this one camera, and all of that is very pivotal work. I was in my 20’s. I had the energy to be out four and five nights a week. So, I guess my career and my life interests walk together. I’m not a photographer who turns up at every event with a camera now. In fact, I’ve got sore thumbs, so less and less am I wanting to photograph, and more and more am I wanting to make ideas and new work with people.

DMC: Which brings it back to what you were saying at the beginning about making work with and making, not taking.

JJ: Yeah. And it’s great because I have three strands in my archive over longitudinal time to explore: Queer, First Nations and South Sea Islander. As a white queer kid, maybe that’s an unusual combination. So I’m not just one-track. I always go home to Tweed, and I have those very strong family connections up there with the Mob. I guess it’s about human connection really. (Laughs) I didn’t have great success with pets. My dog got killed by a car, cat got eaten by a snake and someone cooked my goldfish at the fucking end of Year 12 party at my parents’ house.

I feel much safer with humans, and I feel like I can look after them better.

DMC: Humans being.

JJ: Yeah.