When Joan E. Biren (better known by JEB) sought out images of lesbians in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she didn’t see anyone who looked like her. Rather, she saw images of slim, blonde women — or, weirdly, vampire or demon representations of lesbians — that had been crafted for a decidedly male gaze. “None of them looked like me or any lesbians I knew,” she said. “That’s when I decided [if] I wanted to see images that seemed authentic, I was going to have to make them myself.”
JEB became one of the pioneering photographers of lesbian and then queer culture, both of which had been little documented until then. “When I was young they had these vocational tests for people to find out what you should be,” she says. “I always joke one of the options was not lesbian photographer.” But she pursued that path anyway, and subsequently made history. She disseminated her images in books like 1979’s Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians and 1987’s Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front while also traveling around the country presenting a slideshow called “Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850-the present,” showing images of lesbians throughout history to audiences eager to see themselves reflected in their past.
At first, JEB didn’t see her work as art. She thought of it first as propaganda, then as photojournalism, then documentation; it would take her some 40 years to come around to the idea that her work was art, too. The broader art world, alongside the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, would certainly agree: on June 1, the museum will unveil an 19-image installation of JEB’s images for their 2019 QUEERPOWER Façade Commission on the museum’s exterior. JEB’s photographs were made a time when few galleries or museums would show LGBTQ+ work of any kind, so the premise of seeing her work on the façade of the Leslie-Lohman, one of the world’s most prominent queer cultural institutions, is thrilling. “I’m just delighted and almost speechless, I guess, which I rarely am,” she laughs.
them. spoke with JEB about the importance of images and visibility in activism, the strides queer culture has made and where it still has to go, and how to fight the patriarchy.
What made you decide to teach yourself photography? How do you think teaching yourself changed the way you made images?
In 1969, I came back to the U.S. from Oxford University in England and I joined a radical lesbian feminist separatist collective called The Furies. We believed most of what we knew had been polluted by patriarchal learning. Since I was very verbal, I decided to teach myself something completely different. I chose photography. I taught myself through a correspondence course, a precursor to online courses. I also got a job in a camera store. When I was traveling around with my slideshows, I would give workshops for lesbian photographers. Many of them who were in art schools or studying photography told me they couldn’t show their lesbian work in class. The professors said it wasn’t good work, other students ridiculed it, or they were just afraid. They brought it to me and I did what I could to encourage them to not stop making those images.
No one ever told me my images were bad, and since I never considered them art until quite recently, I wasn’t measuring by that standard. I was measuring them by how they were received by people who weren’t art critics, which was very well. I will say that whenever you are self-taught, at least for me, there is always a lingering doubt about whether you’re doing something in the best or easiest way or about how good it is. But since my goal was not to make art but to make change, I put those doubts aside. I changed how I thought about the work. Initially I thought of it as propaganda, then I thought of it more as photojournalism and then I thought about it more as documentation and eventually as I said I came to think of it as documentation and art, but that’s over 40-some-odd years of evolving.
