Lesbian Photographers Throughout History

... indigenous people of the Columbia River Plateau, US, which she took during a federal expedition and which she later published in a two-volume book titled "Choup-nit-ki: With the Nez Percés."

The federal expedition (1887) was led by anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher who Gay knew from her schools days at Brooklyn Female Academy in New York, an exclusive school for the elite. Though Gay had taught herself photography she failed to earn a permit from the federal government to serve as the "official" expedition photographer so went along as a cook, maid, and secretary. During the expedition Gay took over 400 photographs of the Nez Perce.

After the expedition Gay returned to Washington, D.C., where she and Alice Fletcher shared a house which led to Gay being referred to as Fletcher's "companion", living in "domestic partnership" and in "Boston Marriage" with her. The term Boston marriage became associated with Henry James's The Bostonians (1886), a novel involving a long-term co-habiting relationship between two unmarried women. Over the course of her lifetime, Gay never married a man and had intimate relationships with other women including with English Dr. Caroline Sturge (a friend of Gay's physician in Washington) who she lived with from i1907 in London and Somerset until her death.

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... Edith's New England parents were well-to-do and her father was involved in the newspaper business and also farmed tobacco. She attended Hartford Female Seminary, which was one of the first educational institutions for girls and women in the United States. Though she started out as a watercolourist (with her sister), she started experimenting with a camera. Thereafter, she spent most of her career traversing and photographing North America: Quebec, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Manitoba but focussed on Newfoundland and Labrador. Though she was a skilled landscape photographer, she focused on capturing daily life in rural communities, particularly women.

Edith was a pioneer in photography - at that time, it has been postulated by the Canadian Encyclopedia that women accounted for only circa 15 per cent of professional photographers in both Canada and the United States. Travel photography - at that time, must have been uber tough to get to their destinations. Moreover, before it was common practice, Edith insisted on including photo credits by her photographs (most likely influenced by her early career as a painter where an artist signs their work).

In 1911, Edith met Bermuda-born journalist Victoria "Queenie" Hayward, who became her partner in work and in life. They travelled extensively through Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada and along the East Coast of the United States and were particularly interested in visiting and documenting rural communities and minority groups. Some of the communities they stayed with included; British Columbia, the indigenous Haida; Cape Breton fishing villages and, in the Prairies, Mennonites (who are Anabaptists, which is a faith stream within Christianity) and Doukhobors (a Spiritual Christian ethnoreligious group of Russian origin).

They sold their work to educational publications, magazines (like the National Geographic), newspapers and published a travelogue, Romantic Canada - Edith supplied the photographs and Queenie wrote the text. During her lifetime, Edith’s photographs were exhibited at the Boston Art Club and the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco.

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...photographer and her queer self-portraits. Her first camera was given to her by a family friend, George Eastman, the man who invented the Kodak camera, who gave her one of his new, lighter Kodak cameras to try out. She capitalised her wealthy parents connections and toured Europe as a freelance photographer, in the 1890s. Becoming the only woman photographer in the city, in 1894, she opened her own photography studio Washington D.C which was the epicentre of politics and elite society. There she made a name for herself taking portraits of Alice Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony...

The only known romantic relationship in Frances’s life was with Mattie Edwards Hewitt, whose letters/early 20th century sexts to Frances can be read in The Woman Behind the Lens: The Life and Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston by Bettina Berch. Her queer self-portraits also conveyed a feminist imagining of women with one photograph featuring Johnston decked out in men’s clothing, fake moustache holding the Handlebars of a penny farthing. This was to mock the public outcries against women riding bicycles at the time, majority of which were rationalized by claiming that riding bicycles forced women to dress in "manly fashions," which could lead to the downfall of mankind! She was also very daring by taking a nude photograph of a debutante that prompted the girl's outraged father to file a lawsuit!

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... photographs. Here public photographs were primarily of landscapes and portraits for post cards. It is for her gender-breaking private collection which she is most known for.

After completing her photography studies in Norway Høeg moved to Finland. There she met Bolette Berg a Norwegian photographer who became her life long partner and they moved back to Norway in 1895, setting up their own photography studio, named Berg & Høeg, in Horten, and then moved to Oslo. They also founded a publishing company, Berg og Høghs Kunstforlag A.S., publishing books such as the three-volume Norske Kvinder, which covered the history of Norwegian women.

Berg & Høeg are most known for their private photographs. Upon Høeg's death, a box labelled "private" containing 440 glass negatives were discovered on the farm where the two had lived. The images challenged ideas of gender in which Berg and Høeg were dressed in men's clothes, smoking, and wearing moustaches. The glass negatives are now in the collection of the Preus Museum, Norway.

Berg & Høeg were also suffragettes. Whilst in Finland Høeg became interested in Finnish women's rights movement and their photography studio in Norway was also used as a meeting place for women interested in feminism and women's suffrage. Høeg was the founder of the Horten Discussion Association, the Horten Branch of the National Association for Women's Right to Vote, the Horten Women's Council and the Horten Tuberculosis Association.

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... New York's immigrant populations, Victorian women's social activities, and the natural and architectural world of her travels. She is one of America's first female photographers to work outside of the studio and often transported up to 50 pounds of photographic equipment on her bicycle to capture her world.

Austen met Gertrude Tate, who was a Brooklyn kindergarten teacher and dancing instructor in 1899 at the Catskills resort where Gertrude was recuperating from typhoid fever. Gertrude visited Alice regularly and they spent holidays together in Europe. The friendship between Alice and Gertrude grew into a loving lesbian relationship that lasted for over 50 years. overriding her family's objection over her "wrong devotion" to Alice, in 1917, Gertrude moved in with Alice at Clear Comfort, which is now the site of the Alice Austen House Museum and a nationally designated site of LGBTQ history. So sad, upon Gertrude's death the Tate family learned that Austen and Gertrude had wanted to be buried together, however, the Tate family refused to honour the their beloved wishes. The Alice Austen School on Staten Island, is named after her.

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... a famous commercial photographer taking photographs for architects, landscape designers and rich clients of interior and exterior views of homes and gardens. After studying art Mattie married Arthur Hewitt, a photographer and became his assistant learning photographic processing and printing and attended camera clubs and read photography journals. One particular article on photography by Frances Benjamin Johnston who was a famous photographer at the time, inspired her. They met, in 1901, during Mattie's visit to New York to participate in the Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York. Mattie started writing to Johnston for advice, which then evolved into letters declaring her love... and then she divorced her husband's, moved to New York to work and live with Johnston.

Together they established the Johnston-Hewitt Studio in NYC, in 1913 and became well known in the field of architectural and landscape photography taking photographs of famous buildings and gardens, which were titled "Miss Johnston and Mrs. Hewitt" or "Frances Benjamin Johnston and Mattie Edwards Hewitt." After the partnership with Johnston broke up in 1917, Mattie began to work solo and became famous in her own right.

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...private collection of photographs. Bolette Berg set up a her own photography studio, with her life long partner Mary Høeg, named Berg & Høeg, in Horten, Norway in 1895 and they then moved to Oslo. For their public and commercial work they took photographic portraits and views of Horten and the surroundings areas. But they are most know for their private collection of photographs of themselves which challenged ideas of gender, with Berg and Høeg dressed in men's clothes, smoking, and wearing moustaches. Around 1900, similar gender-breaking photographic projects were undertaken in Europe and America which corresponds with women at the time fighting for civil rights and the right to define their own identity.

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... Born in Ontario, Canada, Clara moved to Buffalo, New York after her oldest brother Francis opened a photography studio - the Sipprell Photography Studio. At first she worked part-time as her brother's apprentice, but at the age of sixteen she dropped out of school to work full-time. While learning the technical aspects of photography, she experimented with a wide range of photographic media, including: bromoil, carbon, gum and platinum prints. She also made a series of Autochome colour prints and even after higher quality colour film was created, continued to prefer that process.

Even though membership was closed to women at the time, Clara became involved in the activities of the Buffalo Camera Club because her brother Frank was a member. There she won a number of prizes at there their annual exhibitions.

In 1915 Clara and long-time family friend and teacher Jessica Beers moved to New York, where they shared an apartment on Morningside Drive and Clara established her own portrait studio. Over the next forty years, Clara became well known for her pictorial landscapes and for her portraits of cultural icons of the time, including: Albert Einstein (theoretical physicist), Alfred Stieglitz (American photographer), Adams Cram (American architect), Charles E. Burchfield (artist), Eleanor Roosevelt (The First Lady of the United States), Fyodor Chaliapin (Russian opera singer), Malvina Hoffman (American sculptor), Isamu Noguchi (artist), Pearl S. Buck (Pulitzer Prize wining author), Ralph Robinson Jeffers (American poet)... Her work was shown in more than 100 photography exhibitions around the world.

In 1937, Clara moved to Manchester, Vermont and soon after she met Phyllis Fenner (1899–1982) who was one of the founding editors of the Weekly Reader and she compiled 79 anthologies for children. Phyllis became Clara's housemate and traveling companion and this "relationship" continued through to the final thirty-eight years of Clara's life.

When Clara died in April 1975 (aged eighty-nine) her ashes were buried in a plot near an outcrop of rock in Manchester, Vermont. In accordance with her wishes, attached to the rock is a small bronze tablet on which, are engraved her own name along with the names of Jessica Beers and Phyllis Fenner.

The Amon Carter Museum and at Syracuse University is the main repository for her work, holding about 2,300 photographs as well as the Clara E. Sipprell Papers.

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... Laura began taking photographs as a child in Colorado and from 1916 to 1917, formally studied photography at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York but, her studies were cut short due to a bout of influenza...

For more than 60 years, Laura Gilpin earned her living as a photographer. She considered herself a landscape photographer, but her images chronicling people and their activities are perhaps her most distinctive work - her portraits capture humanity and the changing conditions in rural America.

Laura was one of the first women to capture in photographs the landscape of the Southwest of America. Though still admired, her early Southwestern pictures have been described as pictorial which was a trend at the time. Pictorialists emphasised the evocation of beauty thus favouring the soft, delicate greys of platinum printing papers over photography’s documentary qualities. Total respect to Laura - it would have been truly arduous photoshoots. She would have to had carry really heavy camera equipment, trekked great distances by foot, jeep, or plane to reach remote locations in pursuit of a shoot and, sometimes, was flown dangerously low in airplanes to achieve her aerial shots.

Apparently Laura's long involvement with the Navajo began in l930, when she and her companion, Elizabeth Forster, ran out of gasoline in a remote section of the Navajo reservation. Thereafter, she created a compassionate and important photographic record of traditional Diné (Navajo) people's life. She pursued photography well into her 80s.

From 1945 - 1975 Laura's photographs were exhibited in 100 venues across America. She published:

• The Pueblos: A Camera Chronicle (l94l)
• Temples In The Yucatan: A Camera Chronicle of Chichen Itza (1948)
• The Rio Grande: River of Destiny (1949)
• The Enduring Navajo (1968)

In 1979, Laura bequeathed the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas over 6,000 prints and 20,000 negatives as well as her personal library collection, and the Laura Gilpin Papers. Laura Gilpin is considered to be one of the great platinum printing photographers of all time, and many of her platinum prints are now housed in museums around the world.

Honours and Awards include:

• 1930: Gilpin is elected Associate of Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain
• 1967: Awarded Certificate of Appreciation for work in the field of Indian Arts by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Elected an honorary life member of the Board of Directors at the School of American Research.
• 1974: Presented First Governor's Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts in New Mexico.

Back to her bout of influenza in 1918... After becoming seriously ill from influenza, she left the Photography School and returned home to Colorado Springs, to recover. Strike it lucky - Laura's mother hired a nurse, Elizabeth Forster "Betsy", to care for her (Laura was aged 27 while "Betsy" was only five years older than her). Laura and Betsy became friends and, later, lived and travelled together. They remained "together" for more than fifty years until Betsy's death in 1972.

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... Florence first started out as a pianist but turned to painting. She studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany (where she studied with Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky), and at the Académie Moderne in Paris (with Fernand Léger). She painted in an abstract style and often combined collage elements in her work and her early works referenced Cubism, Purism, and Constructivism.

After spending a semester at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, in 1927 Florence turned to photography for which she is best known for. Even though photography wasn’t introduced into the curriculum until 1929, it had already been used on campus for documentary, publicity, and experimental purposes for years. She frequently experimented with mirror, angling them to create surreal still lives and self-portraits marked by spatial ambiguity. She also manipulated her images via photomontage, multiple exposures, and negative printing.

In 1929, Florence established her own successful studio in Paris, and taught photography to artists such as Gisèle Freund and Lisette Model. During the Nazi occupation of Paris, photographic supplies became difficult to acquire. As she realised her experimental style was in danger of being deemed "degenerate" by the Nazis, Florence returned to abstract painting until her death in the 1980s.

Only after her death in interviews with her friends was her bisexuality confirmed. It appears her most significant and lasting relationship was with her fellow artist and occasional model, Margarete Schall, with whom she lived with in Paris.

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... It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me."

Cahun was born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob but in 1919, she officially changed her name to Claude Cahun for its seemingly gender neutrality. She found fame when she joined the group of European surrealists in the early 1930s and in 1936, she was featured in The Exposition surréaliste d'Objets, which was held in the Parisian gallery of Charles Ratton and in The London International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries in London's Mayfair.

Cahun's life partner was Suzanne Malherbe, who often went by the name Marcel Moore. Stranger than fiction, Moore was Cahun's stepsister! They met in 1909 when Cahun was fifteen years old and Moore was seventeen. After Moore 's widowed mother dated Cahun's divorced father, the two married in 1917. In 1922, Cahun and Moore (now a illustrator, designer, and photographer) began holding salon meetings inside their home and became known as a power couple in the artist world. In their salon they hosted iconic artists such as Adrienne Monnier, André Breton, Henri Michaux and Sylvia Beach. Cahun and Moore collaborated frequently and it is believed that Moore was often the person standing behind the camera during Cahun's portrait shoots and was an equal partner in their collages.

As Cahun was Jewish, at the rise of anti-Semitism in 1937 they both fled Europe and settled on the island of Jersey. German troops invaded Jersey in 1940, so the two reverted to their original names and masqueraded themselves as being sisters. For several years, the two heroically risked their lives by producing and distributing anti-Nazi fliers to the German soldiers. Many of the anti-Nazi fliers contained translated snippets of BBC reports on the Nazis' crimes and insolence, which were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh criticism. The couple would get dressed up and attend German military events, secretly placing their pamphlets in soldier's pockets, on their chairs, and in cigarette boxes for soldiers to find. They also inconspicuously crumpled up and threw their fliers into cars and windows, for German personal to find. Their luck ran out in 1944 and both were imprisoned and sentenced to death. They were saved by the Liberation of Jersey in 1945 and after the war remained in Jersey.

Cahun's health never recovered from her treatment during her wartime imprisonment, and she died in 1954 while Moore, committed suicide in 1972. Both are buried side by side at St Brelade’s Church, Jersey. In 2018, a Parisian street close to the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs where Marcel and Claude lived, was renamed "Allée Claude Cahun - Marcel Moore".

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... photographer and photojournalist. She was also a pioneer in the development of the photographic book.

Krull led an extraordinary life, living in Munich, Russia, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Monte Carlo, Brazil....and befriending intellects such as André Gide, André Malraux, Colette, Eli Lotar, Jean Cocteau, Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay. Having passionate leftist political beliefs got her in to trouble. In Bavaria she was arrested and imprisoned for assisting a Bolshevik emissary's attempted escape to Austria and later expelled from Bavaria. In Russia she was imprisoned as an "anti-Bolshevik" and expelled. Disenchanted with the Vichy France government, in WWII, she sought to join the Free French Forces in Africa.

In the 1920s, Krull photographed sensual and sexual encounters between women and it is said that she had love affairs with some of her models. She married Dutch filmmaker and communist Joris Ivens. Between 1927 and 1943 Krull entered into a marriage of convenience with Dutch filmmaker and communist Joris Ivens so that she could hold a Dutch passport and could have a "veneer of married respectability without sacrificing her autonomy".

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...the artistic and literary worlds, including writers Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, painters Edward Hopper Marie Laurencin and photographer Eugene Atget. Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923, when Man Ray hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Paris.

Out lesbian, Berenice Abbott lived with her partner, the influential art critic Elizabeth McCausland, from 1935 to 1965 in Manhattan, NYC. In the late 1950s, they bought a house in Maine, where they settled and lived together for 30 years.

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She recieved many allocased including Distinguished Career in Photography Award (1987), Cyril Magnin Award for Distinguished Service in Photography (1994) and Lifetime Achievement Award. Women's Caucus for Art (1996).

Over the course of her life Bernhard had relationships with both women and men. In 1927, Bernhard moved from Berlin to Manhattan, NYC, where her father was already living. There she became heavily involved in the lesbian artistic scene making friends with photographer Berenice Abbott and Abbott's lover, art critic Elizabeth McCausland. She fell in love with a married painter Patti Light. Around 1943, she began a decade-long relationship with Evelyn Phimister, an artist who designed fabric, wallpaper and sets for Broadway shows.

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... Frida Kahlo, George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, Man Ray, Simone De Beauvoir, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Freund achieved many first accolades. She was the first woman to work for Magnum, the cooperative photography agency founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Capa, and others. Also she was the first woman to receive the Grand Prix National des Arts from France in 1980 and the first photographer to have a retrospective exhibition at the Paris Musée d’Art Moderne, in 1991. In addition Freund received the Cultural Prize of the 'Deutsche Gesellscaft für Photographie', in 1978.

Although she married Pierre Blum to gain a French visa, Freund was a lesbian. Many of the literati she photographed were meet through her friend, the French lesbian bookseller and publisher Adrienne Monnier, whose shop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, was a magnet for literati. It is speculated she had an affair with Monnier and Frida Kahlo. Freund visited Kahlo and Diego Rivera at their home in Coyoacan, Mexico City while Khalo was suffering from gangrene and nearing the end of her life. What was supposed to be a 2 week visit, ended up being a 2 year stay where Freund immersed herself in the couple’s life taking hundreds of photographs of Kahlo in her home and studio.

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... 50 photo-reports for Swiss, German and some American newspapers and magazines. Schwarzenbach was strongly anti-fascist and her circle included Jews and political refugees from Germany so in 1937 and 1938, her photographs documented the rise of Fascism in Europe. She was an adventurer and travelled often by car to Italy, France, Scandinavia, Persia, Russia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, America, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, The Belgian Congo...

Her androgynous beauty fascinated and attracted both women and men. In the early 1930s while living in Berlin she had an affair with author Erika Mann (daughter and son of Thomas Mann) and possibly had an affair with photographer Marianne Breslauer when during a Pyrenees. photographic assignment for the Berlin photographic agency, Academia. In 1935, Persia, she married the French diplomat Achille-Claude Clarac who was also gay. They had known each other for only a few weeks, and it was a marriage of convenience for both of them, since she obtained a French diplomatic passport, which enabled her to travel without restrictions.

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... encouraged Breslauer to "go her own way without his help." Therefore, she returned home to an increasingly volatile Berlin. Breslauer was introduced to Swiss photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach through one of her lesbian artist friends, Ruth Landshoff. It is speculated that Breslauer had an affair with Annemarie who was openly gay. Clearly Breslauer was fascinated by Schwarzenbach describing her as "Neither a woman nor a man, but an angel, an archangel." and who for a while became her main muse. Breslauer and Schwarzenbach travelled to the Pyrenees, in 1933, to carry out a photographic assignment for the Berlin photographic agency, Academia. To hide the fact that Breslauer was Jewish, Academia wanted her to publish her photos under a pseudonym. Breslauer refused to do so and left Germany, to escape Nazi persecution.

In Paris the following year her photo Schoolgirls won the "Photo of the Year" award at the "Salon international d'art photographique". She emigrated in 1936 to Amsterdam where she married the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt.

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...Kay was brought-up by her grandparents in Cincinnati, Ohio and developed her interest in photography as a child. Having crushes on stars like Katharine Hepburn (which I so empathise) very early on she was out to herself. With a girlfriend she went to Ohio State University where she studied English and planned to become a teacher.

When she split from her girlfriend, in the mid-1950s, she moved to Boston where a psychiatrist specialising in gay clients showed her a copy of the lesbian magazine The Ladder (published by the Daughters of Bilitis and which was the first nationally distributed lesbian journal in the United States). Inspired, Kay reached out to the Daughters of Bilitis. At a Daughters of Bilitis picnic in 1961, Kay met Barbara Gittings. They became a couple and Kay moved to Philadelphia to be with Barbara. Barbara took over The Ladder in 1963 and Kay became the art director, who made it her priority to improve the quality of art on the covers. In the 2020s it doesn't sound exciting but Kay began to add photographs of real lesbians on the cover as previously covers had featured squiggly drawings. It still took a while to persuade lesbians to pose full-face for cover portraits. It was at this time she changed her surname to Tobin, which she had picked out of the phone book, because she thought it was easier to pronounce than Lahusen (pronounced la-HOOZ-en).

Kay also photographed and documented the LGBT movement's earliest days (years before the 1969 Stonewall Riots) and photographed lesbians who were were virtually absent from popular culture. She photographed LGBT activists during marches, and events and was a prominent gay rights activist, for example in 1972 she worked to push the American Psychological Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Kay and Barbara were together for 46 years until Barbara died of breast cancer on February 18, 2007, aged 74. In 2007, Kay donated all of her photos and writings and Barbara' papers and writings to the New York Public Library.

Kay's photographs offer a rare visual record of the gay rights movement's earliest days and were a major part of the 2019 exhibition Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

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... Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of her sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography.

Leibovitz is best known for her beautifully composed portraits of celebrities in intimate settings and poses. She has worked for Vanity Fair, Vogue, Rolling Stone... and exhibited her works internationally.

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... Libuše was born to painters in Prague. At the age 15, she started graphic arts school and undertook four years of photography courses there. On August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and the country was renamed to The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (under communist rule). Due to a conflict with her father and someone whose wife was a very important person in the Prague Communist party her application to get into the FAMU (the Film and TV school of the Academy of Performing Arts) was "unsuccessful". After almost four years working in a print factory, on her fourth attempt, around the age of 24, she was finally accepted into the FAMU.

Between 1983 and 1985, Libuše photographed the clientele of a clandestine gay bar in Prague, called the T-Club, which she frequented almost every night. Though sex between people of the same gender was decriminalised in Czechoslovakia in 1962, people were still imprisoned for being openly gay. Libuše's LGBT T-Club photographs were not shown until 2008. The collection was published in 2019 as Evokativ. FYI The Russians left Prague on 27 June 1991.

Libuše other subjects have included self portraits, Vietnamese and Cuban economic migrants and the Roma community.

Straight From the horse's mouth:

"I have been with my partner for thirty years and it is a harmonious relationship, but I do not feel good in a purely lesbian category. It’s about a partnership where gender is secondary." - Libuše Jarcovjáková

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