Matt Lambert Captures Radical Forms of Queer Intimacy

How did the book come about?

It was partly a way to punctuate an era of my creative life. I had realised that I was sitting on a lot of really fun archives, and the book felt like a nice way to capture it all in one place. I had also just worked on a project with Vincent Wechselberger, a good friend, and at the end he said, “I owe you a book edit.” I said, “Well, I have a Dropbox of 13,000 images, let's figure out what it is.” 

The initial idea was an archive of the unreleased images, but that felt like we weren’t really doing anything new. Then, as I started to pull out my favourite things, it became clear I had a lot of really good stuff from my films that hadn’t been published. So it was about letting Wechselberger into that space and seeing retrospectively the worlds we had been building around the films, and there was so much material existing around each film, creating little ecosystems almost. 

Through that process I realised that my favourite thing about making films is really the folklore that exists parallel to making them. Things like, how did this happen and why? I feel like a lot of my projects are wildly unlikely projects – a question I get a lot from friends is, “How did you get that funded?” I'm realising that the accessibility to my work needs to come from me being a bit more human in terms of how I talk about it. Not having it be this secret, transgressive thing that you just find, but actually letting people in more. For this book, I thought, ‘Let's just expose more, and hopefully that gives more insight into how it all works’. 

I’m interested in the different elements of your practice, and how they come together. 

The way that I work is very sculptural. It's a lot of, ‘Here's a feeling, here's a character, here's a place, here's a world’, and then sculpting and building from those elements. I've been working very historically over the last few years as well. I co-directed a film, El Dorado, for Netflix a few years ago, which documented the end of queer Berlin from the late 1920s to the early 1930s through the stories of characters who have been erased from history. I have also been writing a fictional narrative set in queer Berlin in a similar era. It made me realise that a lot of my work sits between historical academia and punk expression, and that really it’s about preserving worlds, and characters. Fictionalising in order to preserve, and almost reverse engineering archival, queer ways of preserving. 

How did you start making books?

When I first moved to Berlin, I had no intention of being a photographer. It was more a case of, “Let's grab a camera and start to shoot.” I had also just started dating my now-husband at that time, and it was a period in which everything was so new and exciting; I was documenting my life, and capturing the characters around me too. A friend of mine who worked at a magazine saw the photographs I had been taking, and they did a little story on it. We ended up realising there was a lot of material, and that became a book, almost a scrapbook, of that intimacy of the first years of Berlin. From then, it's been a mix of books, zines and more formal work. 

With this new book, I realised that I didn't really want to make a photography book. I think for me, photography has always been a really magical part of my process, but a small part of it. I think it can be, at least for my practice, a bit reductive as well, because there's just so much more that’s possible. I love photography and I admire it, but I realised that I don't think as a photographer, I think more as a filmmaker. 

You said your work was sculptural, and I feel that a book, especially one that’s not solely a photography book, can allow for multiple dimensions to exist at once. 

Exactly, and there are also elements like time, flow and the way that you guide people through things. I have an ongoing series at Volksbühne Theatre, in Berlin, called Sissy Smut, for which we present queer films, past and present, as well as live performances. It occurred to me that this book has a similar premise, reading it is almost like sitting down to watch a little curation of things. It’s a bit like, “Here’s a bunch of stuff, and you're not going to love everything. There's some stuff that's sweet, there's some stuff that's slutty, there's some stuff that's everything in between. But once you get through it, hopefully it all makes sense as a collection of stories and as a journey.” 

What was exciting about the book too, was being able to take people on a journey and to chronologically connect projects. All the projects that I do are presentations, or reimaginings, of radical forms of queer intimacy and different forms of what that looks like, whether it’s highly performative or intimate. So, in a way, every project is a variation on a theme. Seeing all these things together maybe helps people see that even the stuff that’s more explicit, or more heavy, it's still trying to touch that same intimacy with playfulness and humour.

In terms of working historically, what considerations do you need to have when handling queer histories, a realm for which there might be an impulse to craft a certain narrative?

It’s a very fascinating topic, because I think what we're seeing, particularly in Germany right now, we’re seeing a real changing of the guard in terms of who is there as a historian to preserve narratives. I'm an anti-Zionist Jew living in Berlin who's doing a project focused on queer Jewish characters in 1932, and I'm having conversations with historians who actually can't say the word genocide. At a certain point it’s like, “Guys, we're operating with an old guidebook.”

A lot of older, existing history is told through the lens of quite institutional, famous people who were impossible to erase, and when you begin to research you discover that there are a lot of missing characters. There were people who didn't really get documented, because they didn't fit – they were too queer, too black, too sexual, or too whatever – something made them too ‘unpalatable’ to be preserved. A lot of the famous queer people today, the ones who would be on the red carpet at an event, are not necessarily the ones that I would tell the story of in future. So when it comes to looking back at the past, where are these marginalised characters? How do you find them? A lot of those characters have just been erased. So at some point you have to use fiction to find ways to touch those things. 

When I started my recent project I spoke to a lot of historians, and I was terrified of telling them that I was using fiction elements, but they were like, “Thank God.” In fiction you can use community folklore and stories that you loosely know to be true but can’t totally prove. In a documentary if you can't totally prove something then you can't always use it, so a lot of historians are sitting on really wonderful folklore that can't be touched. Fiction is the place where these things can be touched, either directly or through an energy. 

I'm interested in some of the ‘transgressive’ spaces that you feature in your work, and how you tease out ideas of intimacy and meaning from spaces that might be considered shallow or hedonistic. 

I think humour is incredibly important, humour and theatricality. No matter how heavy things can go in a space, it's about understanding that we are all a multitude of things; we can orgasm and be angry and laugh and and feel all lots of things in a short period of time. For me that's when life becomes interesting, when we're not reduced to one singular thing. I think it’s important to dip in and out of spaces that feel maybe intimidating and transgressive to a viewer, but break that with humour and play and moments that are very real. 

I was looking back at films that have done that in interesting ways, and one example is 2006’s Shortbus by John Cameron Mitchell, which explored sexuality in a way that was free and playful and fun. I think that fun got really lost for a time, especially in Berlin, although it’s now starting to change again and there's a new kind of silly and fun energy that's coming into Berlin as a necessity of the darkness that's here. 

It’s always the same structures that I’m interested in working with. It's group dynamics and seeing how people dance between different modes. I realised that's always been what I’m drawn to, even when I'm doing these big things at the Volksbühne Theatre. It's about that uncomfortability that people experience when they're watching something sexual, and then as soon as you give them a moment to laugh, or a moment of reprise, it’s such a powerful thing. Sex shouldn't feel like this dirty thing, it's another part of our self, and it's another way in which we communicate. It shouldn't be siloed off into a little box. 

Do you like to make people uncomfortable with your work?

No. I did when I was younger. Shock value is very easy in filmmaking, a lot of it is just sound and editing. You can get people there pretty easily, but once you understand how you manufacture that, it becomes a bit cheap. I’m interested in taking people to a point where they feel uncomfortable, but then giving them that breath of release. I never want someone to walk away from one of my projects and just feel bad. 

I made my first film, Flower, with a porn studio, so it got reviewed by a lot of porn blogs. A lot of those people were like, “This isn't porn.” Then obviously in the short film world, people said, “This is so porny.” So it sat in this in-between space. But a really fun thing I remember was someone saying, “This doesn't make me want to masturbate. This makes me want to go out and find that playfulness and that connection.” There's something that's almost aspirational in some weird way: These are a multitude of ways that you can exist in these spaces. 

Your work seems like a way of extending community too. In the book you're presenting certain scenes, but by doing that you're also inviting an audience in. 

There is an old process of intensive digging that we've lost a bit. I can remember the discomfort of finding a queer zine in a shop in the ‘90s, and the deep dive you could take into one person's work. I started to think, the way things are going, what if it all stops? What if making this kind of work becomes something that's not accessible? And what if 30 years from now, someone, you know a Queer Studies student from some little town, ends up in Berlin and discovers this archive? The act of being able to get lost in something that’s been preserved and presented is something I thought about more than appealing to a bigger audience. 

If You Can Reach My Heart, You Can Keep It was also born out of the necessity of preserving all this stuff in one place. Vimeo is not going to be forever, Instagram is not going to be forever, with film work so many archives are just floating in the cloud. A book is a solid thing. It's kind of insane, because you're working on it for a year, and at the end you think, ‘Oh my God. All this for this little thing?’ But then you have it, and you're like, “This is a thing I can just hand to someone. I don't have to speak, I can just let the book do the work.” 

In terms of different spaces, like fashion, porn and art, do you see your work, or even you, as existing in any one of those over any of the others?

I feel perpetually like a visitor in every single one of those realms, which is nice in a way. There are seasons when I'm more connected to one space or another, just by the nature of the projects that I'm working on at any one time. I think almost all my projects can be framed in very different ways depending on how you're speaking about the work, and a lot of them cross over between spaces. In the end, life is all the things, right? Life is what you're wearing, and life is music. In a way filmmaking is the only thing that can catch all of these things, and contain everything somehow.