The camera as a “revolutionary tool”: Joan. E. Biren on unifying lesbians in their struggle for freedom

When I joined my call with Joan E. Biren (known as JEB) about the reissue of her landmark book Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, I had no idea what was in store. The 20-minute standard press chat ran well over an hour as she took me on a journey through the highs and lows of a life fiercely dedicated to art and activism. There were laughs (JEB has extraordinary sharp wit) and there were tears (hers and mine) as we exchanged our own experiences as queer women in different decades. I knew five minutes in this would be a conversation I would never forget.

In case JEB is new to you, the American activist has dedicated her life to social justice and advocating for the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community. In 1979, she self-published a collection of black and white portraits of lesbians in their everyday lives. We see women at home, at work, playing sports, spending time with their children, laughing with friends and embracing their lovers – all the good stuff. The book was radical in its authenticity, intersectionality, and defiance towards the forces of power that continued to denigrate queer lives. Being out 40 years ago could result in you losing your job, apartment, visa and even your children. These acts of violence were both common and legal, forcing people to stay in the closet or risk everything.

The release of Eye to Eye signalled a new way of seeing, reversing a history of invisibility. To me, this book is iconic. It’s a piece of our collective queer inheritance. It’s a document of all the struggles lesbian elders went through to enable us to have safer and freer lives. Its reissue, by Anthology Editions, symbolises a long-overdue validation of this critically important work.

For many queer activists, the language of visual art has provided valuable opportunities to seek control and prevent erasure. While photography has a complicated and violent history, the camera has also been an ally, offering a site to present and define on our terms. In many ways, being in front of JEB’s lens at that time was a safe space to work out, experiment or acknowledge parts of one’s identity that were still processing. A method of simultaneously proving existence and moving forward into the future.

You could define JEB’s work as representational justice. That is the life force pulsing through everything she does. Eye to Eye and her follow-up Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front (1987) are both radically intersectional, even today. Her mission was to represent a confluence of many identities that spoke to age, race, class, gender, abilities, geography, and nuances in the labour force and spiritual practice. “I wanted people to find their friends and their lovers in the book so that they could feel reflected and affirmed,” she says. “Representing the broadest range of lesbians I could was a conscious choice that grew out of my intersectional politics even though we didn’t have that term at the time.”

For JEB, the thing that sustains and drives activism is community. From 1979 to 1985, she initiated a touring slide show called Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–the present, affectionately known as “Dyke Show”. The grassroots campaign, which crisscrossed the United States and Canada, told an alternative history of photography centred on lesbians. Women gathered in bookstores, coffee houses, community centres and church basements to listen to JEB narrate and present hundreds of images over the course of two and a half hours. Structured into six chapters, she presented historical photographs by Berenice Abbott, Lady Clementina Hawarden and Alice Austen, alongside her work and that of her peers Tee Corinne, Kay Tobin and Cathy Cade. “First of all, women would be surprised at how many other lesbians lived in their town,” JEB remembers. “The slide show provided a history we could feel connected to, so we didn’t feel so rootless in the current moment. It really brought us together.”

JEB continued to make pictures of queer life for two decades. The extent of her archive, housed at Smith College, amounts to 64,400 files and is one of the most comprehensive studies of the lesbian movement. By the 90s, JEB switched her focus to filmmaking, producing and directing documentaries, including For Love and For Life (1990), A Simple Matter of Justice (1993) and the award-winning film, No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon (2003), a story of two pioneers of the LGBTQIA+ movement. She is part of a lineage of queer feminist creatives who, despite never gaining the institutional support and the recognition they deserved, continue to advocate for a better world. “Something I learned from brilliant Black lesbians like Octavia Butler to Alexis Pauline Gumbs is that activism is like science fiction,” she says. “We are daring people to imagine another world into existence. Visual media can help make those possibilities real for those who haven’t experienced them. It can spark your desire so much; you are moved to action.”

Forty years after its original publication – it’s fascinating to reconsider Eye to Eye within the current context. What made the book so radical in the 70s was its pure and uncompromising agenda to create and share images made for the community by the community. Queer people, like many marginalised communities, continue to be objectified and commodified by outsiders in ways that perpetuate harm, stereotypes and misrepresentation, underscoring the political weight of visibility and representation. For me, the legacy JEB built is grounded in the inimitable way she photographed with love as a core value. In the opening essay of Eye to Eye, Joan Nestle of the Lesbian Herstory Archives writes, “JEB’s photographs are a mosaic of lesbian strength, of our striving to remake our outer and inner worlds. A refusal to be less than who we are.”