Slava Mogutin’s 25-Year Analog Archive Comes to San Francisco

Slava Mogutin—artist, poet, provocateur, exiled queer legend— brings his retrospective Analog Human Studies: 25 Years of Photography to San Francisco, opening April 2 at the Bob Mizer Museum.  Critics would call his work subtly pornographic. But it’s never that simple, is it? This is basically a queer time capsule spanning decades and continents by a photographer who fled the country for speaking out about queer rights.

Mogutin approaches photography as an ethical act of witness. Born in Russia and forced into exile in the 1990s after persecution for his writing and queer activism, he then roamed the world with a camera, documenting friends, lovers, dancers, sex workers, and artists with a rare intimacy.  His analog photographs are tender, messy, and immediately human. Brooklyn basements, Berlin rooftops, Paris streets, LA hillsides, moments of tenderness (read: dudes with their dicks out!) are as horny as they are political. 

Beneath the provocation lies deep collaboration, he photographs his own friends and lovers, who meet his camera with trust and agency. Bodies are nude, but never anonymous or staged. His subjects are not mere sexy props but full, complex individuals whose scars, tattoos, gestures, and imperfections become marks of lived experience. Sexuality is set as an integral part of daily life, resisting the sanitised neutrality that often dominates contemporary depictions of the male nude. Over the years, his work has grown reflective, romantic even, leaning into mid-century queer visual vibes, quieter palettes, black-and-white, a diaristic sense of time. But the intimacy remains, and so does the bluntness. 

It’s meaningful that his retrospective lands back in San Francisco, as he first fell in love with SF as an exchange student in the early ’90s, snapping photos while Gorbachev was still rearranging the universe. Now he’s back, decades later, showing his analog archive that started there in California, but grew to LA, NYC, Moscow, Berlin, and Geneva. 

In the exhibition, you’ll find images from the Lost Boys series, collaborations with writers and artists, snapshots of queer subcultures, and domestic moments (for instance, sniffing each other’s armpits)—all captured on 35mm, 120mm, and Polaroid film. The opening night is April 2, and if you can make it, Mogutin will also be doing an artist talk on April 10 and a screening of Gay Propaganda 3.0 on May 15. Don’t miss out.