Photo exhibit celebrates LGBTQ visibility
Since January, a photography exhibit titled “Seminary” has been on display in the Divinity School’s Sarah Smith Gallery. The show features the work of Gabrielle Muller ’20 M.A.R., who during her time as a student spent more than a year photographing members of the LGBTQ community at YDS. The exhibit description written by Muller and collaborators JaQuan Beachem ’21 M.Div. and Laura Snell ’21 M.A.R. calls the work an “unapologetic, joyful celebration of queer visibility in religious spaces.”
YDS sat down with Muller to discuss her exhibition. (See the photographs at gabriellemuller.com/seminary(link is external).)
What motivated you and your collaborators to create this exhibit?
![](https://divinity.yale.edu/sites/default/files/resize/images/Seminary_Sophy_14x21-300x200.jpg ""Sophy" from Gabrielle Muller's exhibition")
While taking photo courses at the School of Art, I began photographing my friends at YDS in the Spring of 2019. I was curious about the way photography and photographs function in communal spaces, and more specifically, the way photographs shape and preserve institutional narratives. I was also studying the way shame and guilt have operated as a means of establishing and consolidating power in theological claims about gender, sexuality, and otherness. I decided to build a project that challenged the prominence of the taken-for-granted current stories told by the photographs on the walls of YDS, by centering queer visibility.