Scenes of Everyday Life: Reflections on Paul Johns on the 40th Anniversary of the Homosexual Law Reform
Daniel Sanders
2026


When Paul Johns' Polaroid portrait of Carol Miles was included in a recent exhibition at Cocker & Son, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, marking forty years since the Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986, the image entered another historical frame. Shown as part of a collective reflection on queer histories in Aotearoa New Zealand, it became a reminder of the people and relationships that existed before legal recognition. Yet for me, the photograph already carried another history. It sat at the centre of Johns' 2024 exhibition Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them, where it anchored an exhibition concerned less with the spectacle of liberation than with the social worlds from which liberation emerged. Returning to the photograph now, I find myself thinking about how history remembers queer lives, how photographs preserve them, and what happens when an image is continually reframed by the institutions that exhibit it.

Paul Johns notes that his meeting with Carol Miles in Ōtautahi Christchurch "coincided with my purchase of a SX-70 Polaroid camera." For many photographers during the 1970s, the Polaroid offered a degree of privacy that conventional film could not. Images developed instantly in the photographer's hand, bypassing commercial processing laboratories where photographs, particularly those depicting gay and trans lives, could be censored and, in some cases, confiscated or destroyed. But the appeal of the Polaroid extended beyond privacy. There was no waiting for negatives to return from the lab or labouring over prints. The image simply appeared. It was what it was, but perhaps most importantly, it appeared between people. Photographer and sitter watched the image slowly emerge together, passing it from one hand to another. Before it entered a gallery, the photograph first belonged to a shared social moment. That same quality runs through Johns' practice more broadly. His photographs are observational and rarely attempt to explain their subjects or make them stand in for something larger than themselves.

Johns recalls that he first met Carol Miles at one of the monthly Gay Liberation meetings in Ōtautahi, hosted by artist Tony Fomison in his home during the late 1970s. Miles had recently arrived from the United States of America to take up a position as a physics lecturer at the University of Canterbury. Fomison's house, like many private homes across Aotearoa at the time, became an informal site of political organisation where artists, academics, activists and friends gathered to discuss strategies for challenging the criminalisation of homosexuality, confront police harassment, organise protests, produce newsletters and build networks of mutual support. These meetings formed part of a wider Gay Liberation movement that, alongside organisations including the Gay Task Force, New Zealand Homosexual Law Reform Society, Heterosexuals Unafraid of Gays, the Lesbian Coalition and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality helped shift public opinion and generate the social and political momentum that culminated in the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986.

What stands out in Johns’ recollection is not the politics of the meeting, but his distance from it. He writes, "I wasn't particularly interested in gay liberation meetings; the social scene of a society was liberated by its very nature and that was enough for me." Rather than being drawn to ideology, Johns was drawn to people. His attention rested on friendships and conversations. Carol Miles became one of those people. Recently arrived in Ōtautahi to lecture physics, she entered Johns' life through a shared social world. For Johns, these social worlds were already politically significant because they demonstrated lives being lived despite the structures that sought to regulate them. Liberation was not only something to be fought for, it was something already being practiced.

Johns photographed Carol in the familiarity of her own home and garden. Beneath her modest clothing are extensive tattoos that remain almost entirely concealed, another reminder that identity does not always announce itself. Johns instead locates significance in the diurnal. History unfolds through a cup of coffee with a friend in the lounge on a dreary afternoon, a site through which trans life is inscribed within Aotearoa. It is a familiar scene of everyday life. Here, pleasure is presented as the comfort of friendship, and the possibility of simply existing. There is a tendency to read photographs such as Johns' portrait of Carol Miles through contemporary frameworks of identity, where individuals are expected to stand in for broader communities or political positions. Johns resists that impulse. Carol is not photographed as "the trans subject,” nor as an emblem of liberation politics. She is photographed as Carol. Does it matter who Carol is? How do we answer that when she is no longer here to represent herself?

Her significance emerges precisely because Johns allows her to remain singular. In this sense, his photographs share an affinity with working class documentary traditions that locate historical significance in everyday life rather than exceptional individuals. History is not only made through extraordinary individuals or decisive political events, but through the ordinary lives that make those events possible. Johns' insistence upon the singular becomes a democratic method of historical inscription, locating historical significance in the everyday. Johns suggests that history is equally made through an afternoon spent together. Carol does not perform for the camera, she is allowed to exist within it. In resisting spectacle, her portrait performs an act of historical care, locating trans life within the ordinary life of Aotearoa rather than at its margins.

Wolfgang Tillmans noted, "I somehow have this sense of history—of the now being history … and of the history of the now being possibly rewritten at any time." His reflection raises another question for me: who rewrites the history of the present? Is it institutions, archives and curators working retrospectively, or can photographs themselves interrupt that process? The immediacy of the Polaroid offers one response. Emerging almost instantly into the photographer's hand, it resists the layers of interpretation that inevitably accumulate over time. It records a moment before it dissolves into discourse.

This raises another question for me, particularly in an era increasingly invested in thematic queer exhibitions. Must Paul Johns' photographs always be exhibited within a queer framework? There is no doubt that his photographs constitute one of the most important visual archives of gay and trans life in Aotearoa. But to encounter them exclusively through the lens of sexuality or gender risks reproducing the very logic Johns resists.

Perhaps this is what the immediacy of the Polaroid ultimately offers. Before the contemporary can rewrite its history, the image simply exists. It is what it is. Before it is absorbed into discourse, it first belongs to an encounter. Perhaps that is where Paul Johns asks us to begin.


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