Bishopsgate Institute's Kink Collections Draw Global Interest

Annebella Pollen, a photography historian, highlights the work of archivist Stefan Dickers at the Bishopsgate Institute in London, which has become a global center for LGBTQIA+ archives since 2016. Under Dickers' leadership, the collection includes gay porn magazines, bondage records, and significant items like the Operation Spanner investigation files and 250,000 bondage photographs from Centurian publishing. Emphasizing social history, Dickers collects both amateur and renowned photographers' works. The institute also features Format, a radical female photographic agency, and its reading room displays Pride flags alongside a gibbet cage from The Backstreet bar. The archive welcomes a variety of materials, such as vinyl records and human tissue from gender-affirming surgeries, embracing both sexuality and form in its curation.