In 1979, U.S.-based self-taught documentarian Joan E. Biren (JEB) assembled an archive of lesbian photographs in tandem with her documentary project Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979). This archive-the touring slide lecture Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850-1980 (1979-1985)-"read between the lines", as Biren puts it, by identifying historical photographers and/or their human subjects as lesbian. Of the certain stances, clothes, and gestures that Biren read as lesbian, most important was the gaze, which Biren described as an egalitarian and intimate recognizing between the photographer, the sitter, and the image's audience. Identifying that gaze in the work of the contemporary lesbian photographers whose images appeared within her archive, Biren stitched lesbians' marginal and near-invisible history into a continuously present community. This paper explores Biren's pedagogy of the archive, her use of Lesbian Images in Photography (affectionately known as The Dyke Show) as a collective exercise in looking, identity formation, and consciousness-raising. Focusing on Biren's presentations at the 1980 national conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), I trace Biren's role in educating members of the SPE Women's Caucus founded by Martha Rosler at the same conference. For these feminists, The Dyke Show offered a compelling alternative to then-widespread photographic practices in which documentary photographers (usually white, straight, and male) used their human subjects (often female) as vehicles for their own subjective expression, or authorship. Analyzing how Biren conceived of her photographic archive as representing equitable social relationships in past and present photographic encounters, and used such living memories in building coalitions and communities, I point to the presence of shared rhetorical and formal devices in lectures by Caucus members like Rosler and Catherine Lord to recover the influence of lesbian photography and the feminist slide lecture in histories of North American photography.
