Being born in 2001 puts me firmly in the category of teenagers who came of age lurking in the underbelly of Tumblr.

My sexual awakening was drawn out for me in poorly written fan fictions and sexy GIFs from movies that I’d never seen.

Tumblr was a breeding ground for a certain very curated aesthetic: grungy, edgy and laissez-faire. It had its finger on the pulse of ‘modern style’, showcasing flannel shirts, fairy lights and flower crowns. 

When I turned 15, I had started to grow out of Tumblr a little. At this time, I naively believed that my heterosexuality was a crystallised fact; I dared to think that I knew myself quite well.

This was thoroughly shattered when I stumbled upon my first edition of Black+White at Chapel Street Bazaar.

Image: Left: Djimon with Octopus by Herb Ritts. Published in Black+White Issue 1, 1993. Right: Dannii Minogue photographed with Tim and George Haber by Adam Watson. Published in Black+White Issue 1, 1993.

Australian photography and culture magazine (not only) Black+White (often just called Black+White) was started in 1992, and ceased publication in 2007, when I was six years old.

Coincidentally, 2007 was the very same year Tumblr officially launched. It occurs to me now that this moment signified a kind of handover of cultural commentary and aesthetic tastemaking – from print publications to the then-nascent digital media.

The magazine was full of prolific photographers and models: Naomi Campbell photographed by Bruno Bisang; Yves Saint Laurent photographed by Jeanloup Sieff; Angelina Jolie and Bill Clinton photographed by Martin Schoeller.

Perusing my first edition in 2015, I felt my stomach stir and my thighs clench together. I thought to myself that this must be what good photography does: viscerally invoke a physical reaction.

Of course, this is true to some extent. We’ve all experienced moments where art has demanded a physical reaction from us – I have been (and will continue to be) personally victimised by every cheap jump scare shoved into a pulpy horror film.

As it relates to the work published in Black+White, however, I’ve since realised that it was just turning me on.

Image: Dirty Windows #5 by Merry Alpern. Published in Black+White Issue 16, 1994

Image: Mimi and Tony by Herb Ritts, published in Black+White Issue 1, 1993

When I first saw Helmut Newton’s Jassara in my very first edition (Issue 0), I was aghast. It was truly a world that I had never seen before.

I knew that the moment captured was real – the model had stood there in a clear plastic corset with a menacing grin. As critic and artist Karl-Peter Gottschalk wrote alongside Newton’s photos in this issue, despite being “several times removed from the event, you are a voyeur to the origins of the image.”

It is in this way that photographs are able to induce nostalgia: they carry with them – and show us – a possibility of the past.

Of course, I wasn’t strictly thinking about things like the evocation of nostalgia back in 2016. Mostly, I was transfixed by the images, and stunned that such perversions existed in them.

That’s the thing about sexual awakenings: you think your secret desires are solitary experiences, until you realise that there have been plenty of perverts since the beginning of time.

Image: Jassara by Helmut Newton. Published in Black+White Issue 0, 1992/3.

Image: Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson by Herb Ritts, published in Black+White Issue 1, 1993

Around 2016 was the time that I started to detangle sexuality from gender.

Bodies of any gender suddenly had erotic appeal to me. In Black+White, it was the tightly framed shots of intertwining limbs, bodies folded over, and skin upon skin that drew me in.

I pushed my imagination to the outer edges of every frame and, like countless others, dared to visualise that I was in that space, too.

The truth is, I also thought that owning old magazines made me cool, smart and cultured.

Even if I mostly didn’t understand what I was reading, I could certainly pretend I did. Most tweens want to be somewhat counter-cultural and rebellious, but more than that, I wanted access to an alluring adult world where autonomy AND sex AND whimsy existed together.

Alva Bernadine’s Disappearing Torso, which appeared in Issue 52, is perhaps what most encapsulated those three things for my developing brain.

It’s not an explicitly sexy image. It confused me a lot. On the one hand, it piqued some erotic intrigue, but I was much more impressed with the colours and design of the room – as well as the perfection of that shoe!

Image: Disappearing Torso by Alva Bernadine. Published in Black+White, Issue 52, 2001.

My first issue sustained my curiosity for months. But eventually I decided that I needed more.

That’s how I began collecting loose change from around the house (and out of my mum’s bag) for the $15-ish that I needed to purchase another edition.

Given I could only afford one magazine at a time, choosing from the daunting pile at Chapel Street Bazaar was an agonising exercise. Plus, I was afraid that the magazines might be classed as porn and that I wouldn’t be allowed to buy them if a staff member caught on to my age.

I landed on Issue 16 as my second-ever edition.

It contained an interview with photographer Duane Michals, in which he insisted: “Everything should be subject to photograph – not just the polite things such as moonrises and sunsets and tits and ass… everything: your dreams and your nightmares and Margaret Thatcher.”

I had only ever thought about a photograph as the end result; I’d never really considered it a medium for expression. I always thought that the subject matter had to be sufficiently interesting for a photograph to be worth taking, but Michals challenged me to expand my perception.

To photograph my dreams would to capture people with their mouths full – that’s always when we’re the happiest. Mouths full of wine, words, appetisers, fingernails, music, cigarettes and, of course, each other.

My nightmares on the other hand, are simply snails.

Black+White traversed the liminal space between the beautiful, tragic and banal with sharp editorial discipline and a desire to capture the essence of cultural, personal and sexual moments.

Image: Assortment of pages from Black+White, collated and scanned from the author’s collection.

Image: Assortment of pages from Black+White, collated and scanned from the author’s collection.

Page after page, I was entranced by fashion editorials, photographs and cultural commentary that challenged everything I knew about myself and the world around me.

In hindsight, I was young and impressionable; likely anything of such apparent perversion would have commanded all my attention.

But even as I peruse these magazines now, only a few years older, I recognise the extraordinary achievement of portraying the ‘transgressive’ with the same dignity and artistry as the ‘polite’ things.

Similarly, I didn’t feel as though the publication imparted judgement on the proclivities of people’s sexual lives, but instead presented and accepted them just as they were, as if to say: you might be gay, or into these kinks – so what?

How could you look at Yuri Dojc’s images (below) and think of anything but love? What could be so wrong about laying your cheek on another woman’s body?

Image: Untitled by Yuri Dojc. Published in Black+White Issue 16, 1994.

Image: Untitled by Yuri Dojc. Published in Black+White Issue 16, 1994.

Of course, no publication dealing with such subject matters can do so perfectly. Discourse on sexuality, nudity and queerness has changed significantly since the publication of Black+White, leaving some content a little dated. This is inevitable.

Where I feel Black+White has aged particularly gracefully is in its cultural commentary. Articles about American mythology in Hollywood, how screens would influence communication, and even essays on the “gender agenda” were all either ahead of their time, or offer an amazing snapshot into our cultural history.

Cast next to these essays, some of the more middling nudes seem terse and unmoving. I also see this as somewhat inevitable; among a huge catalogue of work, not everything can be groundbreaking – and ultimately, sex sells.

Most of the time, Black+White leaned cool and erudite. Sometimes it didn’t work as well, and that’s okay. 

Honouring eroticism beyond its initial salacious appeal is a feat, but to do so while weaving in compelling reporting on the global artistic landscape is astronomically aspirational.

Nearly 20 years later, I am incredibly grateful for the role Black+White has played in my life.

I spent most of my teenage years peering into my sexuality from the outside. These magazines pulled me in through the window, and in that room, I found my own perversion to be both encroaching and inane. 

My own queer life is a quiet one, and I still find myself holding my sexuality close to my heart. In the darkness of my own room, I search for queer love in any of its forms. Perhaps I am just clinging to the freedom to define and represent myself in whichever way I choose.