Backwards Glances at Lesbian Photography

In lieu of an abstract, this is the first paragraph of the chapter: Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, edited by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser and published by Pandora Press in 1991, tells us something about what is at stake in an encounter between lesbian identity and visual culture. The book brought together the work of more than 30 photographers and writers, to look at the subject of lesbian representation at a time when lesbian and gay politics was galvanised by the AIDS crisis and, in the UK, the implementation of Section 28, a law that prohibited the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities. By no means the only book to capture the scope of lesbian cultural production that emerged in this context (e.g. Nothing But the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image, co-edited by Susie Bright and Jill Posener in 1996, is another important touchstone), Stolen Glances is a pertinent record of a time when photography, cultural theory and political activism coalesced. The apparently generative spaces in which lesbian photography is shared in 2017 bear witness to the forms of community that underpinned a project like Stolen Glances almost three decades ago. This point can surely be reversed. The visual and theoretical intervention the book makes promises to illuminate the return to these practices and debates in the present