Lesbian Photographers :: Photography Homosexuality Sexuality Essays

Lesbian Photographers Joan Scott makes many assertions in her historical essay on gender. The key point that plays into my own research is that â€Å"gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.† Power, in the case of women and photography, is controlling the political economy of photography--- as in the ability to control or inform both the denotations, and connotations of a photograph. My research project on lesbian and queer photography from the 1930s to today in America illustrates that there is unequal distribution of power, with a strong correlation to race, class, and gender. This mal-distribution of power changes over time and large shifts link with other large shifts in social change. Through oral histories I conducted with lesbian photographers I learned firsthand that telling lesbian or queer history means understanding the politics of shifting power of photographic representation. As Barthes explains in his essay The Photographic Paradox, scholars must look at bot h the denotations and connotations of a photograph in order to completely understand its meaning. A long history of lesbian photography shows how as social changes reconstructed ideas of women, lesbian photography both reflected changes and offered challenges, particularly with gender, sexuality, and race. As in the case for many social groups, the power to produce the lesbian image is skewed over race, class, and gender. An unequal distribution of resources because of race, class, and gender means that there are fewer resources to spread among those who seek to take pictures. In the early days of photography, those with access to photography were overwhelmingly white, male, and middle or upper class. Race, class, and gender also affected the imagining of documentation by photography, the availability of personal space, capital to purchase equipment, and funds to support taking pictures as a living. Furthermore, in order to get pictures published, the photographer needed connections or money. These prohibitive costs prevent an unforeseen number of women, minorities, and poor from imagining that they could record their lives by photograph, so many of these individuals and groups came to be represented by pictures taken by those whose primary identity may lie outside tha t group. A lack of photographers from the inside of the group did not mean that a group wouldn’t be photographed.