The Brooklyn Rail

Joan E. Biren (JEB) is a lesbian photographer—a lesbian photographing lesbians in a lesbian kind of way. She has never been a photographer without first being a lesbian photographer, and she is a photographer because she is a lesbian. The two identities are inseparable, one necessarily preceding and shaping the other. In a widely circulated anecdote shared in her first photobook, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, JEB recalls picking up a camera because she wanted to see a picture of two girls kissing and couldn’t find one anywhere. Holding the camera at arm’s length, she kissed her lover, Sharon, and took a photo, smiling through tightly-closed eyelids and puckered lips. “That’s my first lesbian photograph.”

Making A Way: Lesbians Out Front is Biren’s second photobook, originally self-published in 1987 under her imprint Glad Hag Books and recently reissued by Anthology Editions. With a radiant portrait of veteran Cubby Hole bouncer Stormé DeLarverie on the cover, the book features 105 black-and-white film portraits of around two hundred dykes taken in the late seventies and eighties. JEB has long maintained the future orientation of her photographs; knowing full well the absence of lesbians in the historical record, she set out to document progenitors for later generations as much as her own. Almost forty years after its initial publication, what was first a radical anthology of contemporary lesbianism in the United States free of sexualization or pathologization is now swept into the past as something to look back on.

Captain Lynda Suzanne of Whelk Women opens the book, posing stoically on her sailboat in the Gulf of Mexico, which she uses to “sail women among dolphins.” Middle-aged and steady-eyed, she leans forward to look directly into JEB’s camera. In the following spread, two younger Black lesbians—Archene and Lynn—gently press their sun-lit foreheads together in the backyard of their Atlanta home. Later, a “baby brigade” of lesbian mothers appears at the 1986 March for Women’s Lives, pushing strollers past a hand-lettered sign reading “LESBIANS FOR CHOICE.” JEB’s selections present an expansive array of lesbian identities, from a butch reverend to separatist lesbian-feminist farmers. Documenting one or few of a “kind,” Making A Way doubles as a Noah’s Ark for dykes.

Though JEB is only pictured twice in the book—once in a mirror with her late former partner Minnie Bruce Pratt and again, alone, kissing a camera with the caption “I love photographing lesbians”—she is present in every portrait. Pratt, to whom the book is dedicated, gestures towards this in her foreword: “here we are, the other women and I, in these photographs made by Joan (my lover who you may know as JEB).” She continues, “We are looking at the photographer, the lesbian, who is looking at us, the lesbians; and all of you are looking at us, too.” Though many of the women pictured in JEB’s photos were strangers or brief acquaintances, a knowingness flows between photographer and subject—an intimacy and disarmament seldom found in posed portraiture.

For JEB, the photobook has always been the intended arena for her portraits to be viewed: a transportable, inexpensive medium generally seen by an audience of one, the book is naturally conducive to her vision of outreach. As such, she has afforded serious care and attention to their production, noting in an interview that in addition to encountering a broad disinterest in showing images of lesbians, she first chose to self-publish her books because no press would print her photos on heavy enough paper. The 2025 reissue—with a deep plum clothbound cover and even thicker glossy pages—clearly honors this commitment.

The photographs featured in Making A Way were taken during the period in which JEB toured the country with her slide lecture Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–The Present, more popularly known as the “Dyke Show.” From 1979 to 1985, JEB set up at lesbian bars, colleges, rec centers, bookstores, and other makeshift venues to present over four hundred photographs of lesbians across history to dyke-majority audiences. Pulling together photographs by known historical lesbians, images from herself and her peers, and archival photos of women she suspected as lesbians based on dress, posture, or gaze, JEB built an archive where there previously had not been. With a leg in the past, she was keenly aware of the limited position lesbians occupied in the public eye, seizing the opportunity for correction with her own camera.

I was first introduced to JEB’s photographs through an undergraduate classmate who brought in a different photograph from Eye to Eye every week for discussion. The same year, I was a project assistant digitizing the archive of Victorian lesbian author Radclyffe Hall, who, in addition to openly living as a dyke, came from significant wealth. Every week I meticulously combed through thousands of images in Hall’s pristinely maintained and well-funded archive, then walked into class to discuss single images of JEB’s lesbian mothers, blue-collar lesbians, Southern lesbians, poor lesbians, disabled lesbians. Coincidentally aligned, those few months snapped the chasmal disparities of the queer archival record into sharp focus. I like to imagine JEB doing similar research for the Dyke Show: parsing through photographs of lesbians whose histories were deemed worthy of preservation, extrapolating her own archival meanings where identities were less explicit—and beginning Making A Way from there.

Though she chipped away at the singular, if not absent, visual record of lesbians in the eighties, JEB concedes that absences will always remain. In a short note at the book’s end, she turns to her reader:

Perhaps you would like to see more lesbians in business suits or more lesbians making love. I am willing to work very hard to make an image that I think we need to have, but I can’t always find what I am looking for. So if you are a lesbian and if you feel that you are not reflected in these pages, think about having me with my camera at your workplace or in your bedroom.

Unlike the 1987 edition, JEB has included her contact information in the 2025 printing, encouraging you to be in touch directly.