Sometimes the photographer Robert Andy Coombs operates his camera’s shutter with his mouth. Sometimes, he plays on the much-loved trope of self-portraiture, keeping the cable release visible in the frame, the black plastic air bulb shoved in his mouth like a ball gag. This is how he appears in Untitled (2022), a photograph of himself shirtless, nuzzling a tousled-haired friend, both of them bathed in the red-orange light of a Miami golden hour’s final minutes. The pair are encircled by out-of-focus, floating bits of tech: the trailing release cord, a mounted iPhone, and the sip-and-puff mouthpiece belonging to Coombs’s electric wheelchair, which hovers beside his shoulder. The camera appears, too, casting a stretched blue shadow across his chest.
Robert Andy Coombs, Untitled, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
Untitled, like all the pictures in Coombs’s striking series CripFag (2017–ongoing), is made in collaboration with friends, lovers, caretakers, and assistants. Some participate by setting up the camera or pressing the shutter; others costar in the photographs. Printed large-scale on metallic paper, the images depict in vivid color Coombs giving a blowjob, his wheelchair reclined all the way back; piss play via a urostomy bag; men on leather leashes; an ass crack filled with whipped cream. Most feature nude bodies, but even the few nonfigurative images are charged with their presence. Hoyer with anal hook (2020), for instance, depicts a Hoyer lift with a stainless-steel anal hook chained to its cradle, still dripping.
Robert Andy Coombs, Hoyer with anal hook, 2020. Courtesy the artist.
CripFag is inventive, defiant, funny, tender, and sexy. Its most exciting pictures endeavor all of these registers at once. In Cruising (2021), for example, a nude man squats on a park bench, thrusting squarely into Coombs’s face. Their bodies are nearly overwhelmed by a shimmering tangle of leafy branches, which blend with the many tubes fastened to the back of Coombs’s wheelchair—both life-giving, one plastic. It’s a pointed refusal of the brand of ableism that situates those of us whose survival depends upon technology as incompatible with a pastoral vision of “nature.” Elsewhere, the iconic Ascension to the Throne (2019) sees Coombs sitting on the back of a nude man who is on all fours, while three others surround the artist, gazing toward his face in adoration as they arrange their bodies to form the back and armrests of his “chair.” The alternating tan, peach, brown, and purpling tones of their stacked limbs form a path through the image, as do the pinkish circles that dot their flesh: wrinkled toes, bony knees and ankles, four nipples, a belly button, and the soft, scarred-over wound at Coombs’s windpipe. Here, as in most of these photographs, Coombs appears in the center of the image, looking straight into the lens. Ascension is both a kind of punchline—a throne made of hot, naked men!—and a genuine reframing of interdependence as the genesis of power and gratification. Here and across CripFag is an argument for the sublime pleasures in the ways we care for, and depend upon, one another, by necessity and choice in equal measure.
Robert Andy Coombs, Cruising, 2021. Courtesy the artist.
Coombs’s work does not merely disrupt mainstream ideas about disability, sexuality, and care. It problematizes the capitalist myth of individualism in its entirety—a myth that photography so loves and by its very mechanisms continues to spin. Coombs’s practice critically reroutes and decentralizes the enduring, “purist” notion that sensuality and intimacy depend on a one-to-one, tethered connection between the camera and the body of the person operating it. It thus provides an essential opportunity to rethink photography aided by assistants, models, and various technologies as necessary and generative rather than as a mode of working that distances and detaches the “maker” from the resulting images. Coombs embraces the many bodies and cords and computers as they form a chain, a radically connective and porous vision of authorship, image-making, and living alike.
There is, however, surprisingly little writing of substance on CripFag, and less still on Coombs’s larger oeuvre. The few narratives that do surround his work seem to understand its importance in a singular, if not simple, way. Consider the 2020 Vulture article by the critic Jerry Saltz, who gets it wrong from the jump. He begins: “The photographer Robert Andy Coombs cannot hold his own camera . . . he relies on assistance, and his art takes time to produce.” Saltz’s framing rearticulates said myth of individualism by suggesting that Coombs’s need for time and support is somehow a distinct way of working, disregarding that all images are made, and made possible, only in community. While Coombs’s practice is not profoundly unique in this manner, his choice to visually foreground the inexorable reality of collaboration—of need, artistic and otherwise—certainly is. (Later, Saltz cites Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp [1632] as “useful” to understanding Coombs’s work, an aching comparison in which, it would seem, Coombs is the corpse.) Published a year and a half later, a Cultured review claims that Coombs’s photographs “liberate” him from the label “disabled,” both aggrandizing the impact of representation in art and revealing real bias in positioning disability as a thing we need to be liberated from. Both texts understand advocacy as Coombs’s central project, offering visibility as a kind of reparative gesture. But invoking art’s liberative capacity while failing to name the capitalist structures and legislative bodies that make our cities and lived spaces uninhabitable, force sick and disabled people into poverty, and require us to prove that our suffering meets their for-profit threshold for eligibility feels naive at best and complicit at worst. To say it another way, what is representation worth if we aren’t going to talk about the reasons we can’t survive? And why is disability imagined as that which we can, or should even want to, be freed from?
Robert Andy Coombs, Untitled, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
Though these texts attempt to bolster Coombs’s work, they do so in name only, masquerading as expressions of care while getting stuck in the echoic languages of ableism. As has been the approach to Coombs’s work, mainstream dialogues about artwork that addresses disability and illness still largely center capitalist notions of legibility, productivity, and visibility. One Vogue article, for instance, insists that multidisciplinary artist Emily Barker’s disabilities are “labels [that] don’t define them” nor disrupt their “beaut[y]” and “burgeoning career.” (Barker’s claim that they pursue art only because they “don’t have a body that facilitates other structures of work” deflates such patronizing framings, positioning their art-making not as a conceptual effort to cope or “heal,” but as labor, full stop.) Paper, meanwhile, applauds Panteha Abareshi, an installation, video, and performance-based artist, for “turn[ing] frequent hospital stays into de-facto artist residencies”—even the hospital bed imagined as a site of production. Writer and artist Johanna Hedva has criticized the institutional framing of their own work, which, following the publication of their landmark essay “Sick Woman Theory,” has tended to approach their practice “as if everything [they’ve] made was produced because of and as a way to live with illness.” Hedva’s exacting words distill a pervasive problem found within these and other mainstream critical narratives, which flatten work that engages illness and disability beneath a neat, digestible textual shape, to insist that such work is meant to be doing something for the artist and audience—whom they seem to presuppose is healthy and able-bodied—alike. These narratives, and the forms that contain them, have little tolerance for the fluid fabrics of crip time, which necessitate meandering, drifting, illegibility, and collaboration.
Robert Andy Coombs, Untitled, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
Part of the reason these vocabularies fail is that they resist failure. The Cultured piece, for instance, claims that Coombs’s photographs “embrac[e] his body as a gateway instead of a limitation.” Such language positions artistic production as a way of making sense of disease or disability, leaving little room for reckoning with the realities of surviving pain and pathologization, which are not readily packaged as education or activism, and less still for expressions that can’t be coalesced around survival. I return to two questions posed by the artist and writer Carolyn Lazard that have formed a kind of refrain in my psyche. In response to the pervasive expectation that people should work hard, they ask: “‘What if we can’t?’” And, ‘What if we don’t even want to?’” Lazard’s questions center on pretenses of productivity and achievement, but they also articulate queries about the politics of desire. Within the rigid, narrow frameworks of ableism—scaffolded as they are by end-stage capitalism—sick and disabled people are permitted to want only for healthy, unmarked bodies. The broader public expects that we orient our every activity to prioritize healing, and if not healing, then at least optimization. Coombs’s practice refuses this linearity and narrativization by anchoring (corporeal) desires otherwise. He hacks camera equipment and medical devices for the sake of pleasure and pictures, jointly constructed.
Robert Andy Coombs, Untitled fire island, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
The critical narratives surrounding Coombs’s work largely miss this point. Saltz perhaps misses it most of all, writing that Coombs’s work “demand[s] reclamation of the disabled body as autonomous.” Our disabled and sick bodies are not autonomous, nor does Coombs present them that way. Instead, he insists on interdependence by depicting caretaking as a radically pleasurable activity and pleasure as that which necessitates care. In a series of Polaroids made during a 2022 residency on Fire Island, Coombs and two other naked men fuck in various formations in a lattice-paneled outdoor shower. Another photo of the same shower scene, Untitled fire island (2022), from CripFag, shows Coombs sitting in a plastic lawn chair, sudsy water running over his body. One of the men, still wearing a black cock ring, washes Coombs’s bleached hair. Someone else—someone naked, to be sure—clicks the shutter. The kinds of anti-assistive purisms, technological and otherwise, that still undergird both photography and an imagined radical individualism have no place here. It is because, and not in spite of, all of the bodies and bits of tech incorporated in Coombs’s work that these photographs are profoundly intimate, his practice in sync with living and with living together.
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