This feature essay departs from my work with archives of queer photography, which has focused on a network of photographers associated with the lesbian magazine On Our Backs, published in San Francisco from 1984 until 2006. This work – their photography, mine and others’ research – is often devalued, representing too queer, too femininsed, and too poor, a history of photographic practice despite the pocket of visibility that some queer artists enjoy at present. In this essay I make an argument that this work can be thought of as a kind of queer labour. The sense that queer photography lends itself to thinking about in terms of labour connects it to the history of photography in general, which has tended to have more commercial and industrial applications than it has art world appearances. Throughout the essay, I draw on the work of various photographers including Honey Lee Cottrell, Leon Mostovoy, Phyllis Christopher, Janina Sabaliauskaitė and Rene Matić, to conceptualise the idea of the queer work of photography.