Fashioning the
Grotesque in 
Queer Photography 

Photographer, Aneela Siddiqui, discusses the bifurcation of self,
small-town suppression, and her journey to create outlandish
fashion photography


Photography Credit: Aneela Siddiqui, ASBO Magazine


Within the current landscape of fashion there sits a palatable form of queerness. A type where one’s understanding of the LGBTQ+ starts with Lady Gaga and ends at the exhaustive collection of gay white men running the fashion houses. This un-threatening form of gayness exists within a safety net that is packaged and sold for market comfort. Lesbian photographer, Aneela Siddiqui, does not align with this aesthetic. Her work captures queerness in all its complexities, fashioning the grotesque and imperfect, capturing queer erotica, distorted bodies, Islam and punk. 

And it began, perhaps unexpectedly, in the seaside town of Scarborough.

After moves between Pakistan, Blackburn and Nantwich, Aneela’s family resided in Scarborough for her teen years. There’s a certain amount of boredom that is produced from growing up in a small town – for some remaining within the realms of conformity and monotonous routines suits them just fine. For others, the suppression drives you to a reckless state of identity seeking, bumps of suspicious substances behind school bike sheds and the formation of amateur rock bands with peers. For Aneela, it was the latter. 

She sits in front of me along the sea front of Scarborough and talks me through her teen years here. She recalls these years as a kind of “dreamscape” – a suspended reality far from the pressures of adulthood that she still longs for. Teenage-hood for her was shaped by gigs at her local pub Indigo with its sticky beer drenched carpet and sweaty crowdsurfers, followed by trips to their only gay club ‘Bachhus’. She describes frenzied parties hosted at Lil’s flat above her parents pub. Lil is now a member of rising success ‘Girl Group’ – another creative alumnus birthed from Scarborough- (the small-town theory is true). She laughs at the one-time her mate Billie created DIY name tags from his childhood sticker machine for everyone’s X rated bags of substances – quite the evolution from the party bags filled with birthday cake and charm bracelets. This sort of intimacy and chaos is the core inspiration behind a lot of her photography. It was this period that she began to play around with film photography when capturing these moments. 


  
                                                                           


Photo: Aneela and her freinds in their youth, Scarborough


After putting this era to bed temporarily, she enrolled in the Fashion Photography BA at Leeds Art university, with her final work centring ideas of creatures and imaginary beings, which she affirms were extensions of herself, using performance and characters as a vessel for identity exploration. This was needed during a time that Aneela felt the mainstream fashion industry was absent and continues to lack any true representation of South Asian sapphic creatives. “The version of queerness that has become trendy in the mainstream fashion industry has become so clean and fresh and palatable and I’m not excited by it at all, “she admits. “I want the full shebang, the gayest thing, the weirdest fucking shit known to man.”

Since then, her work has been published in ID, MTV, Notion and Pap magazine. She has gone on to collaborate with the extensive network of Northern creatives, shattering the expectations that you must be London-based to create successful art. She thinks back to one of her first commissioned shoot’s, post- graduate, for ASBO magazine. With a couple of hours to execute a shoot in a derelict warehouse, she shot fashion designer and multimedia artist Bella (@lestats_left_tit). Through off-kilter compositions they dove into a world of punk nostalgia and theatrical gender expression. The shoot demonstrates this sense that Aneela was starting to develop a very strong visual language which she goes on to firmly replicate throughout her work today. 



Photo: Aneela Siddiqui photographs Bella for ASBO magazine,



She pins down one of her favourite shoots, which was a spontaneous collaboration with fellow Scarborough inhabitant, Imogen Sophia, a self-proclaimed “Freak of Nature” commonly known for her costume and toy designs. The shoot explores ideas of the carnivalesque and grotesque with body distortion, costume, prosthetic forms, and fetish wear. Its strangeness is heightened by the mundane backdrop of Scarborough, which Aneela gifted me with a whistle stop tour of. Shortly after sighting the beach where this shoot took place, we passed an abundance of England flags strung on lampposts. Close by was also the leading Reform Party Scarborough office. Her work inherently serves as a reminder as to why we need more outlandish queer art outside of the vacuum we situate ourselves in. “I almost forget sometimes that homophobia exists out there because we just exist in our own little bubble.” Her shoot “The Next Prime Minister” in collaboration with stylist Tom Botting, was a response to this alarming rise in far right ideology dominating her town in which she describes the project as “a reimagination of the Prime Minister as a Pakistani twink”.  



The foundations of Aneela’s work that explores ideas of unconventionalism and confliction stems from her dual identity. She is currently in the process of creating her own image-led zine. “Next to an image of my aunty in Pakistan wearing her niqab, sits an image of 2 girls kissing. I like playing around with the unconventional”. Her instinct to place two seemingly incompatible worlds side by side in her work, is a manifestation of her lived experience within her home. 








Photos: Aneela’s personal project photographing Pakistan


Raised in a Pakistani Muslim household, Aneela would always be navigating the divide between her internal world and the external reality. “The house was on fire all the time” she tells me.  As we discussed forbidden queerness in her room, there was this quiet surrealism that just one floor below us, sat her mum, who was blissfully unaware of the life her daughter lives. Her girlfriend, who was just a “friend visiting” , sat with us too. “I have this whole secret identity that she has no idea about”. “I’m such an apologist for the people that hurt me,” she admits, pointing to the love hate relationship with Pakistan and religion – recognising the sense of guilt she feels for “badmouthing” a place with cultural pride and strong familiar ties but not aligning with its discomforting attitudes towards queerness.  


After her move to Manchester in 2025, she was graced with the connection and tangibility of larger queer networks, in particular the BAL collective (British Asian Lesbians) where she has managed to seek a new level of recognition. “I feel seen,” she says. “I’m not the only South Asian Muslim lesbian in the entire world.” It led her to more lesbian spaces such as Butch Revival, “Manchester’s Lesbian Disco”, home to the dykes. Where identity felt strained and community was limited in Scarborough, Manchester has made up for it tenfold. And in that recognition, her work will continue to exist unapologetically with talk about future plans to create zines and a possible photojournalism documentation of the Hijra community in Pakistan.