COMM.
2026
do you want me to come? explores London’s traditional cruising grounds: Hampstead Heath, Abney Park Cemetery, Battersea Park, Hackney Marshes and Vauxhall. These places have sheltered the gay community since Victorian times. They have been sites of revolution and subversion as well as pleasure, and they survived the heavy policing of the 1980s. Photographed between 2015 and 2023, the project asks whether they are still vessels for social change or have become something else.
The work looks at these spaces with a clinical yet neutral eye. Paths through the undergrowth, overgrown graves, empty benches and figures walking away from the camera are repeated, enlarged and blurred. Translucent pages lay images over one another, so they appear and fade the way they do in the park. Drawing on the silent language of cruising (glances, gestures, waiting), the book builds a new visual language for places that are otherwise invisible.
Alongside the photographs, an essay traces the park from royal hunting ground to the democratic space it became, through Foucault’s ideas of surveillance, transparency and darkness, to the cruising ground as heterotopia.
Project, photography and texts by Sebastian Abugattas
Designed by Studio Wan
Printed on Taiwan V-lite and Taiwan Translucent White
by Jimmy Wonderland, Hong Kong
Typeset in Neue Haas Unica
Clear cover with elastic closure
180 × 234 mm
Self-published, limited edition of 100 copies