From the July-August 2019 issue of News & Letters

The images at Serbian photographer Slobodan Randjelovic’s Lives in Transition exhibit revealed many aspects of life for Queer people in Serbia. While Serbia’s LGBT community breathed a sigh of relief with President Slobodan Milosevic’s exit and with the passage of a law that says LGBT people cannot be treated as unequal, Serbian society remains largely homophobic and transphobic. The photographs and captions show a Queer community that hopes, fears, desires, loves and struggles. The exhibit, drawn from the book of the same title, shows, as the exhibit catalogue states: “the remarkable and inspiring resilience in the human struggle against a repressive and intolerant social environment and demonstrates how friendship and community can help people shape their own futures.”

Lives in Transition is one book in the series Diverse Humanity—photography books that depict Queer voices in various Queer communities, many of them marginalized and persecuted, speaking, confronting and questioning rigid societal so-called ideals about personhood and family. In addition to sexual orientation, diversity of gender identity and expression past the binary are explored. To see the books in the series go to: https://www.diversehumanity.com/

—E. Barclay