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.