Pride From A Wheelchair

Pride looks different from a wheelchair.

From the height of a power chair, the crowd becomes legs, hips, crotches, wheels, pavement, hands, sweat, bags, shadows, glitter, flags, skin, and heat. Bodies move above, around, and past you. Some people look down. Some look away. Some flirt. Some pose. Some forget you are there at all.

Robert Andy Coombs photographs Pride from that position.

As a gay disabled photographer and power wheelchair user, Coombs moves through Pride from inside and outside the celebration at the same time. Pride promises belonging, but belonging is not distributed equally. Disabled people are often missing from the fantasy of queer liberation, even when we are there in the street, in the crowd, in the heat, trying to move, look, cruise, photograph, and be part of it.

Traversing Pride is Coombs’s ongoing photographic project documenting LGBTQ Pride celebrations from wheelchair height. The work moves through queer public space, access, sweat, cruising, bodies, crowds, pavement, exhaustion, joy, and the complicated experience of being both surrounded and separate.

The wheelchair changes the photograph. It changes scale. It changes distance. It changes what the camera can reach, what gets blocked, what becomes intimate, and what stays just out of frame. From this position, Pride is not only rainbow flags and celebration. It is legs brushing past, strangers leaning over, inaccessible sidewalks, heat rising from the pavement, music vibrating through bodies, and the erotic charge of being near so much queer life while still negotiating access with every movement.

Coombs does not photograph Pride as a neutral observer. There is no neutral body in the crowd. His body is part of the work. The chair is part of the work. The need for access is part of the work. The desire to belong and the refusal to disappear are part of the work.

Pride from a wheelchair is not a lesser view of Pride.

It is a more honest one.

As the leading disabled photographer working across disability, queer sexuality, intimacy, care, access, censorship, and desire, Coombs uses photography to make disabled presence visible inside queer public space. The work does not ask whether disabled people belong at Pride. It begins from the fact that we are already there.

In the street.

In the heat.

In the crowd.

Looking back.