In Hurled Towards the Future: Lesbian Photography and Queer Imagination in 1980s London Flora Dunster explores how lesbian photographers in late 1980s and early 1990s London worked within a climate of resistance and possibility to imagine—and create—a queer future. Focusing on the work of Tessa Boffin and Del LaGrace Volcano, this book argues that, through their photography, these artists made a critical contribution to the reclamation of “queer” as both a political identification and an aesthetic practice.
Flora Dunster is a London-based writer, researcher and Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, where she is Course Leader of MA Contemporary Photography and Theory. Her work centres on critical histories and theories of photography, and in particular queer and lesbian work in the UK during the 1980s and 90s. She is author of Hurled Towards the Future: Lesbian Photography and Queer Imagination in 1980s London (Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press 2026), and co-author of Photography: A Queer History with Theo Gordon (Octopus/Ilex 2024). With Gordon, Fiona Anderson and Laura Guy she is co-editor of "Queer Art in Britain Since the 1980s", a special issue of British Art Studies.
Amy Tobin is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Cambridge, and Curator at Kettle's Yard. She is author of Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women's Liberation (Yale, 2023) and co-editor of Cecilia Vicuña, Saborami: An Expanded Facsimile Edition (Bookworks, 2024) with Luke Roberts. She writes and speaks widely on modern and contemporary feminist art, political struggle, and alternative cultures.
