The peaceful Swedish city of Örebro is not where you might expect to find Del LaGrace Volcano, the US photographer known for their subversive images depicting LGBTQ+ communities, drag kings and sexual desire. Yet this is the place they have called home for the last two decades, having moved with their ex-partner, Matilda Wurm, an associate professor at the city’s university. Now, their days are punctuated by walks around a nearby forest and trips to the local outdoor swimming pool with the pair’s two children. It is a far cry from the life they Volcano previously had in London, where they lived in squats, attended S&M fetish parties and documented lesbian cruising culture.
“I do miss it. I think London will always be my city,” Volcano tells me when they pick me up from my hotel in Örebro’s (virtually empty) city centre. Halfway between Stockholm and Gothenburg, the former trading hub known for is medieval castle is “not a queer city”, the photographer admits. Most of their neighbours don’t even know they are queer. Volcano, 68, is intersex and calls themself a “hermaphrodyke” – but these days they “pass as apparently a little old man”, they say with a grimace.
Formerly known as Della Grace, Volcano was brought up as a girl, but once they reached puberty it became apparent that their breasts and menstrual cycle were atypical. On a doctor’s recommendation they were given a breast implant that they didn’t want, and sent off to live as a woman. It wasn’t until the 1990s that their then-girlfriend encouraged them to stop plucking their facial hairs. From then on, they began to embrace their intersex identity, taking the photo Self Portrait with Blue Beard in 1995, which would become one of their most recognisable works.
Much of the press Volcano got was sneery. “I feel like the world wasn’t ready for me,” they tell me. In one interview, published in this paper in 1995, a journalist described “gawping” at the “woman with a beard” who stood before her, while in the gay section of Time Out in 1997, a column entitled “Falling from Grace” detailed how Volcano made the author feel “extremely uncomfortable”.
Thirty years on, the artist is clearly fed up with their identity being debated and ridiculed – and so often getting in the way of what they actually want people to notice: their bold, striking, technically brilliant photographs. That’s not to say that Volcano hasn’t achieved a certain amount of fame. Their photograph series depicting lesbian subcultures, Queer Dyke Cruising and Love Bites, were hugely influential, if controversial at the time (Love Bites was briefly banned by the US customs service because of its explicit lesbian content). But it seems that Volcano is still waiting for their work to get the kind of validation – particularly financially – they feel it deserves.
“I had a really big crisis when I was 65, because that’s an age people are retiring,” they say. “I looked at myself through a very heteronormative capitalist lens and I felt like a failure.” By that point, their marriage to Wurm had ended. They also had a feeling they were going to die at 67 – the age that their mother had died. Volcano is delightfully woo-woo, also attributing significance to, for example, the fact that they share a birthday with celebrities including Helen Mirren and Sandra Bullock, as well as with their ex-husband. Having made it past this doomed age, they have found a new lease of life, and with a major show coming up this summer across two sister sites in the UK: one at Auto Italia in London and the other at the Edinburgh art festival.
Volcano wants their subjects to feel noticed and cared for, they explain – admitting that it’s a kind of corrective response to having not felt seen or cared for as a child. Their parents split up when they were a toddler, so they spent their childhood yo-yoing between their mother’s hippie household in Santa Maria, California, and their father’s strict Mormon one in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Though they discovered in their teens that both their mother and stepfather were having same-sex affairs, their mother was unsupportive when they came out as bisexual. Volcano describes their mother as a “pathological liar”, who told them their father had held her at gunpoint on the day they were born – a story their father later debunked. Even so, since she died they “miss her a lot”, despite having wanted to escape from her for much of their childhood. “I ran away from home a lot” and “officially left home at 17”, they say.
Volcano drives us to their flat a couple of miles out of the city centre, insisting that we stop along the way for a “jaunt around the castle”. Although living in Örebro hasn’t always been easy for the artist, I sense their pride in its beauty as they show it off to me. As Volcano prepares quiches and salad, they leave me to rifle through books and magazines they have been featured in, and to view photographs from their archive. One in particular, a portrait of novelist Leslie Feinberg, catches my eye. Feinberg is centred, looking straight into the camera, in a way that could be aggressive but somehow isn’t. “I think it’s the best photo of Leslie ever made,” Volcano says – I have a feeling they may be right.
They don’t hide their exasperation about how little critics have focused on the technical quality of their work, and they constantly quiz me on my knowledge of artists and queer figures from the 80s. “I want to give your generation [I am 30] a history class,” they say with a sigh, when, the next day, as we set out on a walk through the forest together, I am forced to admit that I hadn’t heard of the sexologist Annie Sprinkle.
Without the forest, which Volcano tries to walk or cycle through every day, it would be “much harder to live here”, they tell me. When we reach an outdoor gym, Volcano attempts a backflip – giving up after a while, not wanting to hurt themself. “I wish I could have shown off for you today, I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t,” they admit afterwards. A few days later, they WhatsApp me a video of them doing some tricks with their child, “just so you can see”.
Whether it’s their gymnastic ability or photography, Volcano is justifiably eager to demonstrate their skill. Back at the flat after our walk, they pull more of their prints out of drawers which are stickered with enticing labels such as “trans portraits”, “femmes of power” and “precious”. They roll back to lie on the living room rug as they share stories of their encounters with famous queer people, from selling a print to The Matrix co-creator Lilly Wachowski and rejecting lauded feminist Judith Butler’s request to have their portrait taken for free, to their brief Romeo & Juliet-esque love affair with a well-known journalist and activist (neither of their friendship groups approved of the relationship because of Volcano’s involvement in the S&M scene, which the journalist was very much not part of).
Despite having had a “very, very, very active sex life” in the past, Volcano isn’t dating at the moment. “I would like to have some kind of romance in my life again,” they tell me. “But nobody measures up to Matt, that’s the problem.” Volcano was with Wurm for 14 years, and though their wedding was Volcano’s third, it was the only time they had married “for love”. Their first two marriages, in 1982 and 1995, were to cis gay men – the second of which, to Johnny Volcano, served the purpose of giving them a cool surname.
For now though, anything more than an “out-of-country fling” would probably get in the way of Volcano’s ambition. They want to write a memoir eventually, but before it can be published, “some people need to die, some people need to grow up, and some statutes of limitations need to have expired”. Until then, they are focused on building up what they call their Queer Archive of Resistance. The ultimate dream is to own a compound, somewhere “at least 10 people can come and stay, to research, study” and explore the artist’s back catalogue. “I will have old and young, queer and non-queer alike coming to visit me in Sweden,” they describe. “I will be telling my stories and showing my pictures and cooking for people, having interesting conversations. That’s the best case scenario.”
