Cruising In The West

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Luca Varano is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose practice moves through landscape, the male body, and queer visual history with quiet, deliberate precision. Working in medium format film, Varano creates images that feel both document and construction, photographs that hold tension between what is visible and what is withheld.

A recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Photography, Varano developed his practice around narrative image-making and a sustained engagement with queer history. His work is less interested in explicit declaration than in implication, environments where queer presence is coded into the landscape itself rather than placed in front of the camera.

Cruising in the West is a photographic project exploring queer presence, intimacy, and erasure across the landscapes of Southern California. The work documents the hidden and often criminalized practice of cruising as both a personal and political act, tracing what remains when people have been forced to disappear.

The project began through research into the migration of queer people from Los Angeles into the High Desert region of Southern California. This area became a safe haven for gay men seeking relief from the intense policing, housing discrimination, and surveillance of mid-century urban life. Palm Springs became a sanctuary as early as the 1930s, while the High Desert attracted those seeking greater solitude and anonymity.

Varano did not photograph people without consent. Instead, he visited known cruising sites during daylight hours, when they were inactive. Some photographs are quiet observations: discarded objects, disturbed earth, faint trails. Others are collaborative reenactments, created with gay men to evoke gestures and positions familiar to these spaces. Together, the images attempt to build a visual archive that speaks to presence through absence.

Formally, Varano chose to photograph in a style reminiscent of the Group f/64 movement, employing deep focus, high-resolution detail, and large-format precision. He uses this formal visual language to assert the historical significance of these spaces, treating sites of queer intimacy with the gravity and reverence typically reserved for monuments. In doing so, the desert becomes both subject and witness, holding memory in its stillness.

A companion series, Cruising in the East, extends this investigation across different geographies, while projects such as Baseball Boys, Male Forms, and Erotic Motion Studies bring the camera closer to the body, exploring masculinity, desire, and intimacy through careful attention to light, distance, and form.

More about his work at lucavarano

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