INSTRUCTIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LEARNING HOW TO LIVE NOW, BY CARMEN WINANT. London: SPBH Editions, 2021. 119 pages.“LET ME PAUSE HERE to say that ‘instructional photographs’ is a term that I have made up; there is no preexisting dedicated category for this kind of picture,” writes artist Carmen Winant in her slim, pocketable book Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now. On the opposite page, a woman gingerly pulls hardened plaster from her face; culled from a photographic “how-to” on mask-making, the black-and-white image has been shorn of captions and context, extricated from the words
The camera as a “revolutionary tool”: Joan. E. Biren on unifying lesbians in their struggle for freedom
In 1971, JEB began photographing lesbians, building a crucial body of work that now stands at 64,400 images. Here, Gem Fletcher chats to her about the transformative nature of her work, her life-long commitment to social justice and the community her practice built.
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When I joined my call with Joan E. Biren (known as JEB) about the reissue of her landmark book
Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, I had no idea what was in store. The 20-minute standard press chat ran well over an hour as she took me on a journey through the highs and lows of a life fiercely dedicated to art and activism. There were laughs (JEB has extraordinary sharp wit) and there were tears (hers and mine) as we exchanged our own experiences as queer women in different decades. I knew five minutes in this would be a conversation I would never forget.