Sydney-based photographer William Yang, now 82, has spent almost 60 years documenting LGBTQ+ life and his own Chinese-Australian heritage, amassing between 500,000 and 1 million images since moving to the city in the late 1960s. His work spans coming out as gay in his late 20s and chronicling the community through the 1970s, the HIV/Aids crisis, and the path to gay marriage in 2017, as well as reckoning with his family history, including the 1922 killing of his uncle in Queensland. He is now speaking out amid what he describes as a global rightward and anti-gay shift, framing his archive as an increasingly urgent record.

Yang recently investigated the killing of his uncle, William Fang Yuen, shot dead in 1922 by an employee on the family farm near Innisfail; the employee was acquitted in a verdict widely seen as racially motivated. This story features in seven annotated photographs at TarraWarra Museum of Art's exhibition Inside the Mirage. The State Library of New South Wales has acquired around 50,000 of his 1970s negatives and is negotiating for his 1980s and 1990s work, which he is digitising himself. Yang says his most valuable material documents the "margins" of gay life that others once dismissed, and he continues to photograph while working on a new book, The Male Body.