Peter Herbert with Lisa Maguire and Simon Lamrock

AN exhibition celebrating LGBT+ artists behind and in front of the camera lens launches this week.

The annual mixed media show 2023 Loudest Whispers will see the walls of the St Pancras Hospital Conference Centre filled with art that fits into this year’s national LGBT+ history month theme “Behind the Lens”.

Peter Herbert, a Queen’s Crescent resident, founded Loudest Whispers 14 years ago “to offer an opportunity for LGBT+ artists to develop their craft”.

In that time, the number of artists showing their work has grown from 14 to 40, many of whom are from Camden and Islington.  King’s Cross resident Simon Lamrock, a regular contributor to the New Journal, has been documenting social change in the borough for the past decade.

His photos have been on the front page of national newspapers, and many times on this one. From the shooting in Somers Town to last week when a pop-up urinal crushed a man in Westminster, Mr Lamrock, like the best photographers, always seems to always be on the scene.

Speaking about how he quit his job as a chef and taught himself photography 10 years ago he said: “The best way to learn things was in the field. I tried to find what I liked. I love nature. I hate studios. For me the meaning is finding meaning within the photography: telling other people’s stories. I think quite a lot of my photography is speaking up for injustice and what’s been going on in Camden with HS2. The biggest part of my photography is documentary.”

He added: “People look at me and say, ‘why are you photographing traffic cones in the middle of Euston Road?’. My friends scratch their heads. And I’m sort of saying this will be a nostalgia picture in 50 years.”

It’s the first time he is exhibiting at Loudest Whispers, with three pictures from last year’s Gay Liberation Front protest – the original Pride before it was criticised for becoming too commercialised.

“It had been the 50th anniversary of Pride with Peter Tatchell and the rest of the Gay Liberation Front in July. I thought there’s going to be so many lovely pictures at the exhibition, I need to stick something in about protest,” he said.

“Given what’s going on today, I think we really need to keep that alive within the LGBT community because we’ve got so many trans things going on at the minute and the government’s cutting back on resources and charities aren’t getting the funding they need.”

The most interesting thing Mr Lamrock has photographed was the opening of the trans crossing in Tavistock Place in November 2021. “I know people put it down as virtue signalling but we’ve got the iconic Gay’s The Word bookshop and a trans crossing,” he said.

“So many people come up to London and their first experience is to get a book from the bookshop and they’ll see that crossing. They’ll take a selfie, upload it to their Facebook and it empowers them and I think that’s a beautiful thing.”

Fashion photographer Lisa Maguire, who lives in Kentish Town, is exhibiting a screenprint of the night she met her ex-girlfriend outside a chip shop in Balls Pond Road in the 1990s.

“I’d been in the Duke of Welly, the first lesbian bar back in the 1990s. I’d been on the piss and was feeling great,” she said. “I was outside the chip shop with a big bag of chips. This vision walks out of a shop in six inch slingback heels and a tiny little vermilion dress. She’s blonde, green- eyed and she just literally took a chip right out of my hand. That’s how it all started.”

Ms Maguire worked for famous hair stylist Vidal Sassoon, covering international hair shows in Japan and doing shoots for The Face and Dazed and Confused.

But she first learnt how to process film at 15 at the now demolished Lyndhurst Youth Club when she was growing up in Camden.

“The arts are wonderful and they’re most forgiving because there’s no age limit. You don’t need bags or qualifications. You just need to think outside the box,” she said.

Curator manager Mr Herbert also learned photography in Camden: at the Working Men’s College in Mornington Crescent.

“The gallery stems from that because I took the photography course and it gave me the idea to create a gallery at St Pancras Hospital, which was where I was working and I asked the management could we turn the conference entrance into a gallery and they said yes.”

2023 Loudest Whispers is at the St Pancras Hospital Conference Centre Gallery from February 6 to March 12 from 9am to 5pm. It is free to attend.