David Trullo’s queer revisionist photography

Working with the theoretical notions of “homonationalism” (Puar 2013) and “pinkwashing” (Schulman 2011, 2012, Spade 2013) and using as a case study two photographic series by contemporary Spanish gay photographer David Trullo, I illuminate the complex situation in which contemporary queer Spanish visual artists must produce their work: they resist homonationalism and homonormativity at the same time that they must work within the very frames of homonationalism and homonormativity to fund, produce, and disseminate their particularly subversive queer politics. In analyzing Trullo’s series, Alterhistory: Una historia verdadera (2010) — a gay and lesbian, homonormative rewriting of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographic couple portraiture — I argue that he simultaneously makes visible and performatively embodies new LGBTQ visibilities and histories in Spain where they were previously erased through a queer manipulation of photographic language, specifically by altering what Roland Barthes has called photography’s “connotation procedures.” Also, I analyze Trullo’s Inca: 20 perfiles peruanos sin filtro (2009), a critique of neo-colonial Spanish enterprises in Latin America and Peru’s racism towards its queer indigenous population, which the artist produced while accompanying an exhibition promoting same-sex marriage funded by the AECID (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo). I conclude that Trullo intervenes in and complicates public debates about LGBTQ rights, visibility, embodiment, and the politics of neo-liberal commodification of progressive rights