beck haberstroh
2025
UNDERTOW presents always have been by beck haberstroh—a suite of sweat-printed photograms that reimagine 19th-century salt printing through the body itself. Drawing from “gay associations” (handwritten inscriptions passed between queer readers) in the Don Kelly Collection of Literature and Culture at Texas A&M University, haberstroh translates touch, care, and endurance into images literally indexed by labor and heat. Here, photographs register not only light but exertion and proximity, bringing queer bodies across generations into direct, one-to-one contact on paper. always have been honors the hands that preserved our archives—and the energy they pass forward.
Over the past few years, I have been developing a process where I replicate the 19th century practice of printing photographs with salt, and instead printing them with sweat. This allows me to bring together traditions of queer performance and experimental photography. Photographs are an index of light, but what if they were an index of sweat? Of exertion, labor, fatigue? Of a body?
I reproduced “gay associations” in the Don Kelly Collection of Literature and Culture at Texas A&M University - inscriptions in the front of the texts that carry messages from one queer person to another. While the texts themselves are produced by mechanized printing processes, these inscriptions are produced by hand. They carry the touch of a person. They are idiosyncratic, personal, often loving.
I reprinted these “gay associations” as photograms using my own sweat. Unlike other forms of photography, photogrammetry is one-to-one, direct, unfiltered. Through this process, we bring together queer bodies across generations into prints. We spotlight and reproduce (imperfectly, impressionistically) the part of the collection that carries the physical trace of queer people past. We celebrate the care, touch, labor that preserves archives, and explore how archives in turn give us the energy to endure.
-beck haberstroh