Russell Granger

ARTIST STATEMENT

The revelation began at the soda fountain counter.

At first, the idea for the images felt like a lark—an amusing experiment in visual history. What would it look like, I wondered, if the familiar language of mid-century American illustration included queer experience? I conceived the scenes, guided the compositions, and prompted what I wanted to see.

But when this one appeared—when that quiet, unmistakable admiration between two boys occupied the warm, authoritative polish of a 1950s magazine image—I was not prepared for my own response. I found myself unexpectedly emotional. Other scenes were indeed amusing, even bawdy. This one was simple. Utterly ordinary. And that is precisely why it struck so deeply.

Nothing about it was sensational. It was wholesome. Tender. The kind of formative human moment that had always existed yet had been willfully excluded from the visual record. Its power lay not in defiance, but in legitimacy. The straight version of this moment was ubiquitous. Still is. Change only the gender of one participant, and in this context, what was once a cliché becomes a revelation.

But why was it so moving?

I’ve always been a student of the past. It began with old movies when I was eleven or twelve—the cadence of dialogue, the tailoring of suits, the architecture of rooms. Later, discovering my family’s connection to Walt Whitman sent me into nineteenth-century Brooklyn. I read obsessively, but reading was never enough. I needed to see it. I collected sketches, engravings, lithographs—anything that could restore the visual texture of a vanished world.

Looking back, the impulse was the same: to find myself there. To locate some trace of continuity between the past and the present. The boy at the counter was so moving because he wasn’t theoretical. He was me.

That realization reframed the entire project.

For much of the twentieth century, mass media did more than reflect American life—it prescribed it. Magazine covers, advertisements, travel posters, and illustrated stories defined respectability and belonging. What appeared within those frames was validated. What was not summarily excluded. Absence carried its own instruction.

What began as a visual experiment became an inquiry: what would those images have looked like if queer lives had been permitted inside the frame? And what does it mean to restore that visibility now?

My professional life has been spent inside media systems—branding, graphic design, and creative direction across digital platforms. I understand how visual language shapes perception because I have helped shape it. See Queerly brings that awareness to bear on the past. It borrows the authority of mid-century media not to parody it, but to reoccupy it.

These images are not revisions of history. They are attempts to see it more fully. What started as a question—what would it look like?—became something else entirely: a recognition that to see clearly sometimes requires a different lens.

The Case for AI as a Tool for Art

AI is best understood as a new studio instrument—closer to a camera, a darkroom, or a printing press than a “replacement artist.” It expands what a single creator can art-direct: rapid iteration, alternative compositions, historically specific visual languages, and variations that would otherwise require teams, budgets, and months. Importantly, the emerging legal and cultural consensus is already drawing a line between machine output and human authorship: the art lives in the human choices—selection, editing, arrangement, revision, and the distinctive intent behind the work.

While generative systems can produce compelling imagery, the finished works here result from sustained direction and refinement. Individual compositions often emerge through multiple iterations, with selected elements combined, adjusted, and resolved using traditional digital tools to achieve emotional coherence and historical specificity. The technology accelerates possibility; authorship resides in judgment.

For See Queerly, the tools aren’t the point—they're the lever. My aim is to produce cultural touchstones that feel as if they always existed: “Mandela effect” artifacts from an America where queer lives were welcomed inside the frame of respectability. In that sense, the work is deliberately Pop: the image functions like a cover, an ad, or a poster; mass-media forms that once defined belonging by omission. Like Warhol’s soup cans, the wager is that the concept carries the charge: recontextualization as a form of authorship, and visibility as an aesthetic intervention. The execution matters—deeply—but it serves the larger act: restoring what history edited out.