SPEAKER / Thursday 15 August 2019 at 6-7pm RMIT Building 12, Lvl 13, Rm 2
William Yang is a documentary photographer. His talk is about his engagement with the Sydney GLBTQI community since the days of gay liberation till the present. It includes coming out during in the seventies, photographing the commercial scene of Oxford Street and demonstrations to decriminalise homosexuality in the eighties, and the AIDS pandemic in the early nineties. He had a friendship with Peter Tully and David McDiarmid, both gay artists, who were both separately artistic directors of the Mardi Gras and who died of AIDS in the nineties. William has photographed the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras since the early eighties and the story of its ups and downs is closely tied to the broad story of gay Sydney.
This project is supported by CAST Contemporary Art and Social Transformation research group based in the School of Art RMIT University.