Wade’s champion for the Wick is Sophie Parker, director of Photo London. She said: “The first works by Bex I really got to know were their images of queer club nights, and one of their earliest series, ‘I Know Who I Am By Being With You’. These images, fuelled with love, energy, and the feeling of community, immediately spoke to me. Though taken in New York, the experience is universal, they are pictures of the connection and joy that comes from getting sweaty with your mates in a basement club. When discussing the works with Bex, we mused whether these shots could even be taken today, pre-smart phones and safe from unauthorised voyeurism they are free of inhibition. Club culture is dying and Bex has created the most wonderful archive.

With a career now spanning nearly two decades the subject of Bex’s work, while varied in focus, is consistent in themes that run throughout: community, love, joy. Always what is key is that they are consensual. Bex has been photographing Pride marches since 2010 as part of their long running series on protest even more vital as the world becomes more hostile towards Trans people. And while the reason for the protest continues to evolve and is terrifying, the pictures are full of that same love, togetherness and power.”

In 2023, Wade became the first trans artist to be displayed permanently by the Victoria & Albert Museum, after five of their photographs were acquired by the V&A. “That recognition matters not just personally but politically.” What has captured people’s hearts through their eyes is the feeling Parker notes of solidarity and collaboration, an intertwining of the kind of image that needs to be made, between photographer and subject. Wade puts this down to the fact that “​​I make photographs from within, at the heart of defiant and complicated spaces where queer and trans life gathers. My work draws from underground parties, protests and the everyday acts of resistance and joy I live alongside.”

From early studies in performance that taught them to “read movement not just as action, but as a language of becoming — deliberate, layered, sometimes mercurial. Not as a spectacle but as a form of testimony,” which explains Wade’s understanding of the nuances of gesture, employed masterfully in their compositions. Their ongoing series documenting Pride parades around the world – “their fractures, their ferocity, their joy”– continues to be a vital witness and rallying cry as trans rights are increasingly threatened by governments everywhere, including in the UK. “I’m thinking about how we hold on to what is fleeting. How we archive meaning. How we keep showing up when history tries to forget or deny us.”