It turns out that ELSKA is not only our favorite queer photo-zine, but also we actually enjoy the same birthday as them. Queerguru and Elska are both celebrating their 10th Anniversaries this year …..and what a wild ride we both have had so far
During his time, ELSKA has published over fifty issues, spotlighting local men from LGBTQ+ communities around the world. To commemorate this milestone, a print publication titled ‘Ten Years of Elska: Special Retrospective’ has been released, with a collection of Elska’s favourite stories and portraits has been selected.
We were drawn to editor/photographer Liam Campbell’s work immediately because instead of models or celebrities, the men he featured are beautifully ordinary and appealingly imperfect. And instead of highly edited and polished writing, the texts are real, raw and sometimes random. Alongside tales of coming out in a Mormon town or falling in love on a road trip through Ukraine are a frank account of gender transition, a diatribe against a homophobic society in Northern Ireland, and even a lusty poem about foreskins!
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It’s remarkable given the state of the world at present that for the first issue, he flew to Lviv, Ukraine and hoped to meet three or four local guys who he would photograph in the city and then publish some sort of little staple-bound zine. But everything just sort of exploded. He actually met twelve guys there and ended up doing at-home nude portraits as well as vaguely editorial-style street shoots. Because of all this extra content, he had to expand his project into something more like a book. And then he had the idea to include stories, both his own chronicles about his journeys as well as stories contributed by the men he met, which made the publication grow even larger.
What caught our attention was that from the very beginning was how Campbell’s work is both a celebration of honesty and diversity and also helps us understand and appreciate a global queer community. Some are in far fling places many of us will never get to visit so Elska’s profiles can flll in the gaps and make us feel closer to our ‘gay brotherhood’
Elska’s roster includes books made in well-known and lesser-known places, as well as in gay-friendly and not so gay-friendly societies and when combined, a total of 827 different men have taken part in for Elska, and many more are on the way. Elska print books, including the new ‘Ten Years of Elska: Special Retrospective’ are sold in select shops around the world and for order online.
