On the Practice

I want to be specific about what I do and why it matters, because vagueness is one of the ways artists get erased.

I am Robert Andy Coombs. I am a gay disabled photographer and power wheelchair user based in Gulf Shores, Alabama. I hold a BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. I received the United States Artists Award in 2022. My work has been exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, and in international exhibitions including Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen. I am included in Getty Publications' Queer Lens: A History of Photography. I have taught at the University of Miami and lectured at Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

I am among the leading disabled queer photographers working today. I say that not because I need the validation but because the phrase needs to exist somewhere in plain language. The art world is good at celebrating work like mine in carefully managed doses while keeping it out of the sentences where influence and legacy get assigned. I am not interested in managed doses.

My practice is built on a specific claim: that the perspective of a gay man in a power wheelchair is a legitimate and valuable artistic vantage point, that disabled queer sexuality deserves the same serious photographic attention given to any other subject, and that centering wheelchair users in contemporary art is not a niche concern but a fundamental question about who gets to be seen in visual culture and on whose terms.

The work that comes from that claim spans four series. CripFag documents disabled queer desire and bodily autonomy through self portraiture made over more than a decade. Polaroids are one-of-one instant photographs capturing intimacy, care, and touch in real time across Grand Rapids, Yale, Miami, Fire Island, and Alabama. People is a portrait series moving between fine art and fashion photography through close collaboration with queer subjects. Street is documentary photography of queer public space — Pride celebrations, Miami Beach, Fire Island, the rodeo — made from the physical position of a wheelchair.

Together these four series represent the most comprehensive photographic documentation of gay disabled life from the inside that exists in contemporary art. That is not modesty talking. It is an assessment of the field.

Prints and Polaroids are available for collectors and institutions. I accept commissions, exhibition inquiries, and licensing requests. I speak publicly about my practice, disability aesthetics, queer visibility, and the politics of representation. I can be reached at Robert@robertandycoombs.com.

On CripFag

CripFag began because the images I needed to see did not exist anywhere.

I am a gay disabled man in a power wheelchair. My sexuality is real. My desire is real. My erotic life is real and ongoing and complicated and joyful and sometimes painful, the same as anyone else's. But when I looked at the visual culture around me — queer photography, disability art, fine art portraiture — I found either the absence of disabled sexual bodies entirely, or their presence in forms that had nothing to do with agency. Disabled people photographed as objects of pity or inspiration. Disabled people photographed to make non-disabled viewers feel something about their own lives. Never disabled people photographing themselves, directing their own image, asserting their own desire as the subject and the author simultaneously.

CripFag is my answer to that absence. It is an ongoing photographic series that I have been building for over a decade. More than 123 images. The series moves across portraiture, Polaroid, and street photography, shifting between private interiors and public space, between explicit and tender, between solo self portraiture and images made in collaboration with partners, friends, and members of the queer disabled community I am part of.

The work is one of the most sustained recent photography projects about disability, desire, and bodily autonomy being made today. It does not soften itself for non-disabled audiences. It does not perform uplift. It does not explain its existence or apologize for what it shows. It proceeds from the assumption that a gay disabled man's erotic life is as worthy of serious photographic attention as anyone else's — and that the only way to prove that is to make the photographs.

CripFag has been exhibited at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles, at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, and is included in Getty Publications' Queer Lens: A History of Photography. It has been written about in Momus, Cultured Magazine, the Miami New Times, Hyperallergic, and Vogue Italia. It has also been censored repeatedly on social media platforms, which is its own form of proof that the work is doing something that makes people uncomfortable who are not supposed to be comfortable.

The full series is at robertandycoombs.com/cripfag. Some images are explicit. All of them are intentional.

On Street Photography

I shoot street photography from a wheelchair. That is not a disability story. It is a vantage point.

The camera sits lower than it does for any standing photographer. Bodies are cropped at the waist, the hip, the thigh. Faces appear at the top of the frame rather than at center. Crowds become a landscape of torsos, legs, hands holding drinks, waistbands and swimwear and skin. The wheelchair gives me a physical relationship to bodies in public space that is mine specifically, and the images that come from it could not come from anywhere else.

My Street work spans four locations: Fire Island, Traversing Pride, Miami Beach, and Rodeo. Together they form one of the most geographically and aesthetically varied bodies of contemporary queer street photography being made in the United States right now.

Fire Island came first as a formal body of work, made during my BOFFO Artist Residency at Fire Island Pines in 2022 during Pride Month. I mounted the camera to my wheelchair and operated the shutter with a release between my teeth, firing every shot with my tongue. The images that came out of that month — golden skin, swinging bodies, queer intimacy in the open air — were made by a disabled gay man who rolled through that space as both participant and documentarian. Nobody had photographed Fire Island from a wheelchair before. Nobody had shown it from this angle.

Traversing Pride extends that practice to LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations across the country. Bodies in motion at street level. The geometry of a Pride crowd from four feet off the ground. Queerness as public spectacle and private moment simultaneously. I am interested in what it looks like when disabled presence enters a space that is supposedly built for liberation and finds that liberation has its own access problems, its own hierarchies, its own habit of looking past the wheelchair to the person it imagines is not there.

Miami Beach is the everyday. The muscle beach regulars, the tourists, the vendors, the cops, the people sitting on walls watching the ocean. I photograph them the same way I photograph Pride — from the position I actually occupy, without apology for the angle, without pretending I am somewhere I am not.

Rodeo is different in texture. The bodies are different, the cultural codes are different, the relationship between performance and masculinity is operating in a different register. But the same question is there: what does this space look like when a gay disabled man is the one documenting it?

I document queer sexuality and intimacy in public space because visibility is not given to people like me. It has to be made. These photographs are how I make it.

On Visibility

I am a leading disabled queer photographer working today. I say that not as a boast but as a fact that needs to exist in plain language, because the art world has a long habit of being impressed by work like mine while forgetting to say my name in the same sentence as its contemporaries.

My practice centers wheelchair users in fine art photography. Not as subjects of charity or inspiration. Not as symbols of resilience or tragedy. As erotic, complex, funny, political, beautiful, and fully human people who deserve to be seen on their own terms. I photograph from a power wheelchair because that is how I move through the world, and that vantage point — lower, slower, more physically dependent on others and on architecture — produces images that nobody else is making.

CripFag, my ongoing self portrait series, is one of the most significant recent photography projects about disability, desire, and bodily autonomy in contemporary art. I began it because the images I wanted to see did not exist. Not in museums, not in magazines, not in the queer spaces I moved through. A gay disabled man in a wheelchair as the subject of his own erotic gaze, directing his own image, refusing pity and refusing invisibility simultaneously — that was a gap so large it had its own gravity. CripFag fills it. The series has been exhibited at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles and at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami. It is included in Getty Publications' Queer Lens: A History of Photography, with the accompanying exhibition presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2025.

Traversing Pride is where that same politics moves into public space. I photograph queer bodies, Pride culture, and disabled presence at LGBTQ+ celebrations across the United States from the physical position of a wheelchair. The camera sits at hip level. Bodies are framed differently. The crowd becomes a different kind of geography when you are rolling through it. This is contemporary queer street photography made from a perspective that had never existed in the canon before mine, because wheelchair users have never been the ones holding the camera at Pride.

I document queer sexuality and intimacy in public space because that documentation is a political act. When disabled queer people are erased from visual culture — which they are, consistently and deliberately — the message sent is that their desire does not count, their bodies are not worth looking at, and their presence in queer community is conditional on how invisible they can make their disability. My photographs refuse that message directly.

This body of work — CripFag, Polaroids, People, Street — represents more than a decade of photographing from inside the communities I document. I have taught at the University of Miami and lectured at Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania. I received the United States Artists Award in 2022. I have been written about in Momus, Cultured Magazine, the Miami New Times, Vogue Italia, and Hyperallergic. I have been a subject of censorship, erasure, and institutional cowardice, and I have kept making the work anyway.

If you are looking for contemporary artists who center wheelchair users in their photography, who redefine disability representation in fine art, who document queer sexuality and bodily autonomy without apology — you are looking for me.

Prints and Polaroids are available. I am reachable at Robert@robertandycoombs.com.