Taking its name from a phrase heard in a Berlin darkroom, If You Can Reach My Heart, You Can Keep It by photographer and filmmaker Matt Lambert depicts a decade of queer underground culture
Photographer and filmmaker Matt Lambert’s new book is named after a line uttered in a Berlin club’s darkroom: “If you can reach my heart, you can keep it.” The irony of romance discovered in the depths of the city’s underground isn’t lost on Lambert, but it becomes a central premise of the book: a pursuit of intimacy and desire in their alternate forms.
Lambert has been chronicling underground worlds since he landed in Berlin in 2011. In the beginning, his practice was fuelled by curiosity. “Each project became a way to touch something that made me uncomfortable but excited, a way to enter a world, get closer to its characters, and then share that intimate obsession with others,” he explains. Once a project was finished, the subject felt demystified, and he moved on to the next.
But as he slowed down on partying and nightlife, the filmmaker began to see an archive forming behind him. While developing a film that cut together characters and worlds from Berlin’s underground queer scenes, he realised the importance of a photobook as a way to preserve these moments, people, and the ephemeral intimacy that had long existed at the margins. The result was If You Can Reach My Heart, You Can Keep It which collects a decade of queer films, stills, scripts, and scraps into a single archive.
Growing up in 90s Los Angeles, Lambert was surrounded by fragments of sex culture and subcultural media. “Every friend in the Valley had a porn-shoot house nearby,” he recalls. Porn ads in the back pages of LA Express, DIY punk posters plastered on telephone poles, and the constant presence of the adult industry became part of the visual makeup of his adolescence. “I used to take the bus down to this shop, Retail Slut, and buy studs and spikes to stick into my clothes as an aspiring teen punk, always hanging out and constantly trying to score weed in Venice. I remember seeing zines there that were too cryptic for me at the time, but they pulled me in.”
Now pulled into the orbit of that world, Lambert's work across media, especially in film, is populated by queer icons. The photobook brings together these figures: Mykki Blanco, Christeene, Peaches, Rick Owens, Michèle Lamy, the Cock Destroyers, Sean Ford, Kaiden Ford, Vaginal Davis, among others. He describes them as “prophets of their, and our, tribes: individuals who embody all of it in everything they do”. For Lambert, documenting such figures is essential. As he tells Dazed, “Vaginal Davis described the necessity of her queer-core movement as being ‘too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays’ – that small intersection of scenes within scenes where transcendence can happen. There are so few singular icons who live their worldview through every breath of their body, and they are the energy that keeps us all connected. We have to protect them and keep them going.”
The book’s release comes at a moment when joy itself feels precarious. “With the non-stop nightmare of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we’re watching the world fracture around us and losing almost all faith in humanity. So much feels meaningless, even the things that once held value. Yet one thing we can try to hold on to is our humanity, our capacity to embrace moments of joy – especially queer joy, which is under attack globally. Creating brief moments of respite in the midst of this hellscape has never felt more necessary,” Lambert explains.
For him, that possibility is what keeps the work alive. “When I first discovered transgressive queer and faggot art, music – the whole world of it – it was reality-shifting. Total magic. Sex was irreverently woven through the fabric of everything, and all these projects tried to touch different pieces of those feelings. Everyone who needs it should be able to access that moment–the thing that opens them up.” It’s the same introduction that his own archive might offer: “I hope the book allows someone – anyone – to find at least one person to fall in love with, someone who sends them spiralling into that world.”
If You Can Reach My Heart, You Can Keep It is available here for pre-order.