Ali Miranda

Between the studio and the street

This exhibition is based on Ali Miranda: Beyond Photography and Homoculture, the online solo exhibition SoFLaFoto curated for the artist in 2023 within Picturing Queerness in the Americas. The platform that hosted that show has since closed, and the exhibition went with it. This revisit rebuilds it from the same body of work, held in SoFLaFoto’s artists’ archive, and puts at its centre what the photographs most plainly are: a celebration of a community that cast itself as its own stars, made by a photographer who belonged to it.

Born Jorge Miranda in Havana in 1954, Ali left Cuba with his family in the early 1960s and grew up in Miami. He trained in fine arts in San Francisco and New York and then came home. Photography began as a job before it became a vocation: “There was only one job available on my ‘heart-felt’ bulletin board at that time,” he recalls, “it was photography!” After years of fashion and commercial work for magazines and advertising agencies, he opened his own studio in South Beach in 1987. He describes himself simply as an art photographer, and he calls the work he made there “erotic surrealism.”

The exhibition opens in the street. In South Beach Drag Queen Scene, performers pose in groups, in colour and in daylight: around a pink pylon, at a lifeguard stand, in feathered costume in a fountain, piled into a red convertible. No one is caught unawares. They arrange themselves for the camera, in public and on their own terms, and the pictures keep a record of how this community chose to be seen.

Starlettes are saying: “Don’t say sandwich to me!” follows that self-invention into the everyday life of the street. Don’t Say Sandwich To Me was John Kroll’s restaurant on Washington Avenue at 14th Street in Miami Beach [years open]. As Ali remembers it, it stayed open around the clock, as many places in South Beach did then. Ali designed its menus, and their covers carried his portraits of drag performers, each billed as a star: Patty Cakes, Henrietta Robinson, Kittie Meow, Varla, Adora, Electra, Tiny, Calina, Fifi, Rafaela, Jackie O, Paloma and Divina. The menus were printed and used in the restaurant. Paired here with the portraits they were made from, as SoFLaFoto first presented them in 2023, they show a photograph leaving the studio to become an everyday object, and the performers’ names circulating through the city as names worth knowing. Several of the same performers appear in the street photographs [Ali to identify who, and in which images].

At night the setting moves indoors. Miami Gay Scene, four black-and-white flash photographs made at La Escuelita [year], shows the same world off the street: on a staircase, in the crowd of a club, around a dinner table. With Warsaw, La Escuelita was one of the venues where Ali photographed the scene, and like most of the places in these pictures it has since closed.

The second half of the exhibition moves into the studio, where desire is staged rather than recorded. Male Erotica (1990) treats the male nude in black and white, lit for form, texture and skin, within a line of studio photography that runs from George Platt Lynes to Robert Mapplethorpe. Carni-val (1990) breaks with that classicism. Its diptych photomontages join bodies with Catholic and tarot imagery, masks and ornaments into small fables. Eros of Dreams (1993) goes furthest into fantasy, setting male and female figures among sculpture and props in scenes closer to theatre than to documentation. One prop, a halo of rods, passes between all three series, as if the studio were a single continuous workshop. Many of Ali’s sitters were found in the bars, clubs, parties and beaches of Miami Beach, and in front of his camera, as on the street, the body becomes a means of performance.

Exile is not the subject of these photographs, yet they come from a child of exile who found a chosen community in Miami Beach, and the self-invention his sitters perform echoes a city remade by people who had to begin again. The photographs were also made in the years when AIDS was devastating gay communities in Miami Beach, as elsewhere. Seen from 2026, they keep faces, names and gestures that the city has otherwise lost. What was made as celebration now also works as an archive: personal, partial, and made from within.

The exhibition’s title points to that double life. Ali Miranda’s photographs are images of desire made by an artist inside the world he pictured, and documents of a homoculture that official archives rarely kept. Between the studio and the street, his work shows how a community pictures itself when it is also the one holding the camera, and, as the fate of the first exhibition shows, how easily such records can disappear.

William Riera
Curator, South Florida Latin American Photography Forum (SoFLaFoto)