Photographing Pride - Eye for the Light

It’s a little before 2pm on Zürich’s Helvetiaplatz, and this square in the city centre is packed with people. A sense of expectancy hangs in the air. Pride flags flap in the breeze, someone puts the finishing touches to a face-paint rainbow, a group of drummers beats out an infectious rhythm on the sidelines. A figure on stilts picks their way through the crowd, and a banner held high reads ‘love is love’. This is June 2024, and I’m here to photograph the 30th anniversary of the Zürich Pride Festival.

Eye for the Light Pride — Zürich Pride, 30th anniversary June 2024, Zürich, Switzerland © Rudolf Abraham

Finding the essence Pride

The Zürich Pride Festival began its life in 1994 as Christopher Street Day, an annual stand against discrimination towards the LGBTQ+ community in this city and beyond – and was renamed the Zürich Pride Festival in 2009, the year in which the city hosted Europride. It is now Switzerland’s largest Pride event, with around 20,000 taking part in the Demonstration – which is what I’m joining in and photographing today – and some 50,000 attending the Festival as a whole over two days. The scale is admittedly smaller than the 2 million attending an event like Madrid Pride – but tens of thousands packed into the streets of central Zürich still makes for one mightily impressive crowd.

The flamboyance might seem similar to a carnival, but this is only superficial. At a carnival, people dress up and wear costumes to assume another identity; in a Pride parade, people are simply dressing up to celebrate being themselves.

A significant difference between Zürich and most other large Pride events is that on the Demonstration there are no barriers, no segregation or division between those taking part in the procession and those watching – the line between spectator and participant is completely blurred. Effectively everyone here is taking part – their presence in itself a show of solidarity, a celebration of queerness. Anyone and everyone is free to join and walk with the Demonstration, or at any point step aside and watch from beside the street. This is in one sense merely coincidence – it’s a public event, and by law all public events in Zürich have to be open to everyone. Nevertheless the difference it makes to the overall experience compared to any similar event I know is simply huge.

Not just a celebration

Notice I said Demonstration, not parade. Along with the atmosphere of celebration, the sense of protest which lay behind the original Christopher Street Day has not been lost (it’s still emphatically called a demonstration, not a parade). Advertising, which is a very prominent part of the spectacular Pride in
London for example, is at a bare minimum in Zürich. ‘To fight for one’s rights is still and will [continue to] be important and relevant now and in the future’ says Julia A. Müller, Managing Director of Zürich Pride Festival. It’s also one hell of a lot of fun – an extended blur of music, dance and celebration stretched out across the whole afternoon and evening, and quite far into the night. All set against a backdrop of tolerance and respect.

What makes Zürich Pride special?

Solidarity is strength. The theme of the 2025 festival is Gemeinsam für unsere Gesundheit, which translates as ‘Together for our health’. Julia adds: ‘[This year] we also celebrate the 40-year existence of the Swiss AIDS Federation: Aids Hilfe Schweiz’. Despite it now being more than 40 years since cases of what would later be called HIV/AIDS were first recorded, it is a condition which is still stigmatised, and AIDS-related illnesses still claim more than half a million lives each year.

Pride in London Parade

So, given the lack of barriers and segregation, this is also the only event of its kind or even remotely similar, for which I was unable to obtain accreditation – not for lack of trying, but simply because it doesn’t exist. Which suited me just fine, since when it comes to an event like this I’ll almost always choose being immersed in a crowd rather than photographing from the sideline.

Photographing on the streets, capturing the essence

To a large extent, I photographed the Zürich Pride festival as I would any other large event, with the difference that I was even more particular than usual about ensuring anyone I took a portrait of had given their consent. Taking someone’s portrait is both a privilege, and an extension of trust.

There’s a warm, easygoing vibe during the hours I spend moving through the city with the Demonstration, despite the underlying context of peaceful protest. Tens of thousands of people from all walks of life, smiling and dancing in the street, and feeling safe enough to let their guard down and basically just be themselves – how could anyone not love this?

I had spent the evening before the Demonstration at Landiwiese, the festival ground on the outskirts of the city, on the balmy shore of Lake Zürich – an area packed with street-food stalls and bars, informations stands, with a program of concerts by national and international artists.

Celebrating through the night

The evening’s concert culminated in a much anticipated performance by Nemo, fresh from their 2024 Eurovision win just a few weeks earlier. Again, gaining a permit was a no-go – they don’t exist, as the whole backstage area remains off-camera as a safe, private space, accessed only by the event’s own photographers. Understandably. However I was lucky enough to be given permission to access the pit between the stage and the audience – and after finding a suitable spot, switched into gig photography mode. Nemo was only performing one song, so I wanted to be sure I found the spot I wanted to stand in beforehand – in this case, wedged in a corner bracing my camera arm on a speaker stack. This had the advantage of a different viewpoint to the area directly in front of the stage, where it protruded deep into the audience – and the disadvantage that I only caught Nemo’s expression on the few times they turned to the side!

On one hand I could just say I loved photographing Zürich Pride Festival for the same or similar reasons that I love photographing carnivals and other festivals – because they’re some of the most vibrant and boundlessly joyful goings-on you could ever hope to be immersed in, let alone have the privilege to point a lens at. And looking at the resulting images, I find so much love of life.

Importance beyond celebration

But there is of course another motivation. Cue in Hungary’s recent ban of Pride celebrations, the relentless ideological assault on gender and in particular the trans community in the US, and the recent ‘re-interpretation’ of gender definitions as expressed in the UK’s 2010 Equality Law. In the increasingly populist right wing politics of the present day, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, any celebration of diversity and inclusivity is more than deserving of – and sadly, still in desperate need of – all the support it can get.