About
James Gardiner
A pioneering collector of queer ephemera, London based antique dealer James Gardiner has spent more than fifty years trawling through countless thousands of old photographs, at flea-markets, fairs and auctions, and in locations as far apart as San Francisco and Latvia, searching for actual visual evidence of a gay culture which has often been denied or supressed.
Photo by Dom Agius
This collecting resulted in two major books
1992
A Class Apart
– the private pictures
of Montague Glover
1996
Who’s a Pretty Boy Then?
One hundred and fifty years of gay life in pictures
A Class Apart has become a classic; Montague Glover’s remarkable private images of his life and lovers, shedding new light on the lives of ‘ordinary’ British gay men in the early 20th century, when they were all, by definition, criminals.
Whilst James Gardiner’s core collection of some 1500 images was acquired by London’s Wellcome Library; (which is fully digitised and available online at www.wellcomecollection.org), the original prints used in ‘A Class Apart’ have remained in his possession, and it is from these that the selection offered here is based.
