A Pioneering Photographer Revives Her Slide Show of Lesbian Life

For several years, starting in 1979, the photographer Joan E. Biren, or JEB, travelled around presenting a slide show that she’d spent years building. “I started touring at a time when lesbians had no place in society and no known history,” she recalls. “I wanted us to feel like we belonged in a bigger world.” To connect to a sense of shared lineage and to envision a future of lesbian life, JEB had curated a series of images from the past. Today, the idea that representation matters has become a commonplace, but JEB’s story shows just how radical it is to establish and share images of a community that has been relegated to the margins or completely hidden from view. She recalls being a young woman, having a lover of her own, and yet never having seen an image of two women kissing. Back then, she snapped a photo of herself and her girlfriend, lips locked, and made what she calls her first lesbian photograph. That image is included in the slide show, which JEB revisited in 2023 and was presented by the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in New York City, in an auditorium full of women who made clear how meaningful it was for them to see these photos and to hear JEB discuss the stories behind them. The photos are all focussed on queer women, from different places and historical eras, alone or in groups, creating a kaleidoscopic history of women presenting themselves to the camera lens, looking sexy, comfortable, jaunty, serious, and everything in between.