Seeing “eye to eye”—Joan E. Biren’s photo-book Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979)
Llewyn Blossfeld
Advisor: Dr. Ann Reynolds
Abstract
Joan E. Biren (1944—) is an American, a lesbian, a photographer, an activist, and a “propagandist” whose first book of photography, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, was published in 1979. Biren’s mission was to contribute to the creation and circulation of photographs of lesbian women, to which she contributed thirty-seven diverse portraits produced on black-and-white film with her 35-mm Nikkomat camera. As a lesbian-feminist working in the 1970s, she taught herself photography through a correspondence course and began making images during her time in the Furies separatist collective. In her article titled Lesbian Photography—Seeing Through Our Eyes published in 1982, Biren wrote about the collaborative relationship between herself as a lesbian photographer and her lesbian subjects, stating, “There’s a look here that’s passing between a lesbian muse… and a lesbian photographer, something direct about it, without being confrontative [sic], it’s open in a certain way, there’s a presence behind the eyes.” This belief informed the creation of her book, Eye to Eye.
My thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter one studies the first of many “types” of images I categorized in Eye to Eye, the “images of lesbian mothers” type. My “types” are limited to a few categories into which the images I have selected fall based on sometimes relatively small, and sometimes overarching attributes which distinguish themes of subject as I have described them. These types are fluid and often overlap in the photographs, but are used by me to consider the sociological aspects of Biren’s selected photographs. I argue that by including images of lesbian mothers in her book, Biren is both flattening the lived experiences of the three mothers photographed while simultaneously expanding visual media of lesbians to fit the role of motherhood, and incorporate Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957) in my analysis. In chapter two I introduce the material existence of the book in relationship to its circulation, and give a brief version of Biren’s biography, including her years as a lesbian-feminist activist and her career presenting a visual history of lesbian photographers across the United States from 1979 to 1984 titled Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850 to the Present. The lesbian women who Biren presented in this slideshow as her photographic foremothers are also included in the introduction to Eye to Eye. In chapter 3 I discuss several of the other “types”, including but not limited to images of lesbians in the workforce, images of feminist spirituality, and images of lesbians engaging in semi-public communal activities. In chapter 4 I set up the force I see as counter to “type,” which I call “stereotype.” I use Richard Dyer’s definition of stereotype as an ordering based on partial knowledge in order to present several types I consider to be easily susceptible to derogatory stereotyping from a potential unsympathetic viewer of Eye to Eye’s photographs. These stereo-typed types include images of Black lesbians, images of lesbians with mental illness, and images of the lesbian bar. I end my thesis with a brief consideration of my positionality during the writing of my thesis and a celebration of Biren’s achievements in publishing Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians.