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Essay By Susie Bright One afternoon, Jill and I sat down for a cup of tea, in between editing photographs. We'd looked at over a thousand photos, we'd interviewed photographers all over the world, and we'd had regular brainstorming and production meetings-- with tea, and sometimes animal crackers-- for over a year. Jill said, 'You know, it's really amazing we're still speaking to each other after all this time. Do you think we should be arguing more?" "No," I said, "the reason we're not arguing more now is because we've been debating this for ten years-- the politics, personalities, and aesthetics of lesbian photography. That's why we can get along now!" I had read Jill's play, Any Woman Can, (1974), about coming out as a lesbian before I met her. I'd sent her outrageous photo postcards to my friends-- the perfect feminist graffiti. I was inspired to meet her, delighted to further subvert her; hired her on at On Our Backs, almost fired her, flirted with her, pounded my fists on the floor in exasperation at her, became roommates with her, and modeled for her dozens of times. We collaborated on a few years' worth of photo shoots and photo acquisition projects. We always dreamed of doing a lesbian erotic photo book to show off the talented women we had worked with, and our first baby effort was a lesbian calendar in 1986. It was adorable to look at, but almost impossible to find except at underground gay and feminist bookstores. But even if it had been better distributed, the calendar was an ephemeral item. It was agonizing to see how little recognition we could get for these women who literally represented the visual side of the lesbian renaissance and the feminist revolution in the arts. Then came "lesbian chic." As mainstream politics and media opened up lesbian images, it was inevitable that Jill's work would fulfill its ambition to be seen. Her work as a photojournalist, in theater, and fine art, in portraits, and of course her trademark graffiti documentation have reached straight and gay audiences all over the world-- not because it is chic or trendy, but because of her political alertness to what is gong on in the gay community, and how gay identity presents itself at its boldest and most influential. "I photographed the graffiti that I found; I never created it in the early days. Somebody called me in late '79, and said, 'Have you seen the billboard on Farringdon Road? It's a Fiat car ad. " [The ad slogan said, 'If It Were a Lady,, It Would Get its Bottom Pinched,' and then was graffitied to read, 'If This Lady was a Car, She'd Run You Down.' The advertisers claimed this bit of sexism was a humorous allusion to the Italian origins of the car.] "I went down there and photographed it. I had this sense about it, and I sent it to the Guardian newspaper. It is one of the most successful political photos of all time, really. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands it sold. Over half a million. It was feminism, pure and simple, and it was not humorless; it was subversive, and it was populist." If Jill had not come of age in the era of women's and gay liberation, it is inevitable she would have been attracted to whatever were the most subversive and disarming politics of the time. Her portraits of so many unique and unusual women are inspired by her natural outrage towards hypocrisy, stereotypes, and against the individual being swept under the rug. Her photographs of "Dirty Girls in London" show off her provocative point of view with a butch/femme couple making out in bliss as if they were on a Roman holiday , resplendent in leopard skin and leather. In reality, the two lovers were making out publicly in one of the most sexually repressed nations in the world. Surrounded by Britain's historical markers, "Dirty Girls"' sexuality superseded both tourism and public exhibition to take on a grandeur of its own. Perhaps Jill's most notorious work, next to her graffiti books, are her portraits of and collaboration with Chinese-American author and poet Kitty Tsui. Kitty first posed for Jill in a San Francisco garden, next to a ladder, bare-chested and in leather jeans. It was a modest set of circumstances, but in fact , these elements were revolutionary to the traditional Asian women's image. The geisha girl, the diminutive and deferential blossom babe of virtually all "Oriental" eroticism was left by the wayside as Kitty showed a defiant, androgenous , and charismatic character who left no doubt as to her racial, sexual, and -- so dear to Jill--uniquely individual identity. Like the other pioneers in Lesbian photography, Jill has mastered taking the element of "dirty"--the sex you can taste and feel-- and integrating it with classic sensibilities. When you look at Jill's pictures of Lisa and Lulu in the toilet stall, or Susie examining herself in the mirror with her dildo harness on, you have the dilemma of the pornographic vs. erotic dancing right before your eyes. These models are clearly not playing bridge--they are not coy or implicit. Yet the forthrightness of their sexuality and pleasure does not lend them to the "piece of meat" category either. We look at them, we may enjoy their bodies and fantasize our own sequels to their scene, but we are entirely convinced of their own agency and integrity. We don't know these women from Eve, but it is easy to guess that they are not befuddled or desperate models--that they dish it out as well as they pose it. When critics of sexual explicit imagery cry out that shame and degradation are inherent to the process of showing female sex, of showing women without their clothes, they are oblivious to the context that that sex display is taken in. Jill's ambition to investigate sex photographically developed as she grew disillusioned with the ahistorical perspective that many of her contemporaries insisted upon. "Do you not publish things because somebody else is going to exploit them? " she asks. "That was always one of our attitudes in the radical lesbian movement-- that you do not publish something if a man can take it and misuse it. You deprive yourself of the experience, because you cannot take the risk. I began to have a real problem with that; I wanted these photos I was taking to be seen. From 1979 to 1982 was the period when I fell out of love with anti-porn feminism, and fell in love with another idea: that you cannot contain your own creativity to prevent some guy from jerking off on it." Jill insists her photography is inspired by her sense of satire, and certainly that affects her commentary as well, but I say that's just one side of her presentation. Her Jewish family's direct history with the Nazis, her early embrace of the civil rights and feminist movements, and even her love of the most rebellious kinds of American and British pop culture have all added up to Jill's interest in making images that make people pause, incite them-- and sometimes, make them laugh in delicious recognition. She's a firebrand, a political participant and innovator. Her sense of the history of the world, and how she wants to influence it, is her driving force. Jill never would have done lesbian erotica for sensual self-exploration--excuse me while I laugh---or for erotic awakening. She is a self-confessed prude when it comes to her own body. Her interest in radical lesbian sex has to do with her most passionate beliefs, about her family, about freedom from oppression, about the revolutionary value of integrity and creativity, democracy and diversity . |