Artist Volumes, Issue 2, 2025
Ryan Patrick Krueger’s work addresses themes of grief, loss, and desire through their process of collecting and appropriating vernacular photographs to consider the intersections of LGBTQ+ American history and photography. Krueger has been using eBay over the last decade as a primary resource for materials to focus on methods of appropriation and assemblage. Their interest is in how photography can be insightful to the ambiguity of LGBTQ+ history before the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s. This, as well as the lack of curriculum for LGBTQ+ history in the U.S., inspired Krueger to begin collecting. The artist specifically searches for vernacular photographs prior to the Gay Liberation Movement to consider the dependency between photography and history, during a time of invisibility for queer life.
Sweet Pea specifically focuses on found letters and personal classified ads in the newspaper. The layers of meaning that exist within the archival photographs make visible forms of male intimacy that were unfamiliar and sublime. Krueger looks for moments where men are situated shoulder to shoulder, and creates compositions from these discoveries. The form of the accordion fold book echoes the experience of looking through the materials sourced and collaged.
Matt Morris contextualizes Krueger’s practice in his essay “Desire, Disorganization, Defiance,” in which he writes:
“There are myriad standpoints from which to confront the new-millenium next-gen half-life of queer politics and the out-of-the-closet mania of the visible world into which it is situated: one of them is retrospective, searching out alternative mapping systems for how known quantities of the gay experience have been historicized though an investigatory analysis that introduces new space for the as of yet unacknowledged […] Krueger’s eroticization of the archives in breakdown isn’t just directed toward the figures depicted but also the [continual] state of their disarray […] Krueger’s interpays trenchantly underscore desires’s persistence as a dis-organizing principle, no more in support of the Order of institutional memory than dissenting from it.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
©Ryan Patrick Krueger
Images courtesy of the artist.
All works by Ryan Patrick Krueger
Text by Matt Morris and Ryan Patrick Krueger.
Quoted text from: Just Out Newspaper, Classifieds Section, 1990, Portland, OR
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design and Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellín, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
First edition / 300 copies
2025
Artist Volumes, Issue 2, 2025
Ryan Patrick Krueger’s work addresses themes of grief, loss, and desire through their process of collecting and appropriating vernacular photographs to consider the intersections of LGBTQ+ American history and photography. Krueger has been using eBay over the last decade as a primary resource for materials to focus on methods of appropriation and assemblage. Their interest is in how photography can be insightful to the ambiguity of LGBTQ+ history before the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s. This, as well as the lack of curriculum for LGBTQ+ history in the U.S., inspired Krueger to begin collecting. The artist specifically searches for vernacular photographs prior to the Gay Liberation Movement to consider the dependency between photography and history, during a time of invisibility for queer life.
Sweet Pea specifically focuses on found letters and personal classified ads in the newspaper. The layers of meaning that exist within the archival photographs make visible forms of male intimacy that were unfamiliar and sublime. Krueger looks for moments where men are situated shoulder to shoulder, and creates compositions from these discoveries. The form of the accordion fold book echoes the experience of looking through the materials sourced and collaged.
Matt Morris contextualizes Krueger’s practice in his essay “Desire, Disorganization, Defiance,” in which he writes:
“There are myriad standpoints from which to confront the new-millenium next-gen half-life of queer politics and the out-of-the-closet mania of the visible world into which it is situated: one of them is retrospective, searching out alternative mapping systems for how known quantities of the gay experience have been historicized though an investigatory analysis that introduces new space for the as of yet unacknowledged […] Krueger’s eroticization of the archives in breakdown isn’t just directed toward the figures depicted but also the [continual] state of their disarray […] Krueger’s interpays trenchantly underscore desires’s persistence as a dis-organizing principle, no more in support of the Order of institutional memory than dissenting from it.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
©Ryan Patrick Krueger
Images courtesy of the artist.
All works by Ryan Patrick Krueger
Text by Matt Morris and Ryan Patrick Krueger.
Quoted text from: Just Out Newspaper, Classifieds Section, 1990, Portland, OR
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design and Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellín, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
First edition / 300 copies
2025
