Additional Images

Provenance:

The Personal Collection of Carole Pope, courtesy of United Contemporary

Note:

Bursting onto the music scene in the late 1960s, Canadian rock icon Carole Pope unapologetically surpassed boundaries and advocated for LGBTQI+ visibility decades before the acronym existed and before sexual orientation was included in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Throughout her career, as half of the musical duo Rough Trade, and as a solo new-wave vocalist, Pope’s lyrics have always been provocative and sex-positive – making her “a fixture in Canada’s queer community.”(1)

Waddington’s is honoured to offer two never-before-seen photographs from the Rough Trade “Avoid Freud” album cover shoot photographed by Jorge Zontal, a member of the famed Canadian art collective General Idea. Having recently acquired the “Avoid Freud” contact sheet for the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent collection, Curator of Photography Sophie Hackett emphasizes the importance of this particular album shoot stating: “Made for Rough Trade’s 1980 album Avoid Freud — featuring their most well-known track ‘High School Confidential’ — the contact sheet of lead singer Carole Pope is a study in icon-making. Posing in a Thierry Mugler jacket, with a martini glass, Pope is the epitome of Queer cool. General Idea once again deploys the photographic image for its symbolic power and skewers it at the same time.”(2)

(1) Oliver Skinner et al., “Carole Pope: The Crotch Grab Heard around the World | Super Queeroes,” CBCnews, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/artsprojects/superqueeroes/carole-pope.
(2) Burke Paterson and Melanie Trojkovic, “AGO ACQUISITION CAROLE POPE PORTRAIT BY GENERAL IDEA,” United Contemporary, November 5, 2022, https://www.unitedcontemporary.com/news/30-ago-acquisition-carole-pope-portrait-by-general-idea/.