Not yet published

I know a place is the fifth instalment in Drew Pettifer’s ongoing publishing project with M.33 of monographic works centred on the negotiated queer male gaze.

For this volume, Pettifer invited curator and art historian Michael Gentle to assist in editing the book and to contribute an essay. Gentle writes:

What compels me most in Pettifer’s process is its refusal of nationalist impulse. Queerness, in these images, stretches far beyond the borders of a nation. He pulls the subject close – almost under a psychological microscope – and demands the ambiguity for the photograph to breathe. The bare titles, often reduced to a subject’s first name, refuse the weight of historical monumentalisation.

Across the narrative field of this book, queer conceptions of place are mediated gently. Pettifer’s subjects are not particularly distinguishable, nor are the spaces they inhabit. This is his iconoclasm: place is not fixed, nor singularly defined, but the fusion of multiple psychic forces. In his hands, place is freed from the contamination of national associations. Even when iconographic markers appear – a Hills Hoist, or the afternoon sun dissolving into flannel sheets – they are reframed as intimate mementos, not nationalist shorthand.

Pettifer’s work leans into the uneasiness of 'place' as a generative force in identity formation. Rather than offering the queer body as icon or emblem, his images open it as a porous site where intimacy, memory, and desire fold into one another. This refusal of fixity troubles the fantasy of a distinctly ''Australian queer aesthetic', revealing instead how queerness bends and unsettles the very frameworks – colonial, national, normative – that seek to contain it.

80 pages, 26 x 19cm, softcover
Published by M.33
ISBN: 9781764086929