GLR May-June 2025

whose practices flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Nevertheless, the exemplary few whose traces have been preserved demonstrate the importance of photography as a cultural and professional lifeline forwomen. § T HE STAKES OF PROFESSIONALISM were especially high for lesbians, the least culturally visible and socially rec ognized women of all. Elvira Studio in Munich rose to the challenge of redressing this situation. Two feminist activists, Sophia Goudstikker (the first female state-li censed photographer in Germany) and her lover Anita Augspurg launched this enterprise in 1887. The studio quickly earned a reputation as the hub for an emerging lesbian feminist community. The Elvira portrait œuvre constitutes a veritable who’s who of the feminist move ment in Germany. At the same time, it could be viewed as an extended “family album” commemorating close relationships between and among the women of the Elvira Stu dio circle. Goudstikker and Augspurg assumed leadership roles in women’s struggle for civil rights. In 1894, they founded the So ciety for Women’s Interests to broaden the socioeconomic reach of feminism. Augspurg contributed writings that denounced gender-based discrimination (particularly in education) to the feminist newspaper The Women’s Movement ( Die Frauenbewe gung ). With the active support of Goudstikker, she founded a legal protection bureau for women. An Elvira photograph published in TheWeek ( DieWoke ) in 1899 as part of a series devoted to “Leaders of the German Women’s Movement” shows Augspurg at her desk, leaning as if in thought on one fist, her dog curled up on a rug behind her. The photograph, taken by Goudstikker, pictures Augspurg as a quintessentially intelligent and independent woman. Corre spondence, manuscripts, and framed portraits of women en cumber her desktop. We recognize a few these women’s faces in a group portrait taken in 1896. Five feminist activists (including Goudstikker, Augspurg, and Augspurg’s second partner Lida Gustava Hey mann) align closely, bust to back, with no space at all between them. Two of the women proffer writing tablets, and each holds up a pencil, resting the tip on her chin. Heads tilted in thought, the five feminists enact their right to speak out, their authority and intellectual agency as women. Moreover, the close align ment of their pose and the homogeneity of their clothing encode their collective status as a movement: They are united, insepa rable, acting as one. When Goudstikker and Augspurg separated amicably in 1907, Elvira Studio continued, under the direction of Goud stikker and her chosen successor, to participate in the re-inven tion of women and their relationships well into the 1920s. A photo staged in the studio around the time that Augspurg left the business shows four women, described in the title as “stu dents,” grouped sociably around a tea table, each with a ciga rette in her mouth. The two women at the center of the composition (one of them Augspurg) lean toward each other in profile, cigarettes between their lips nearly touching, as if light ing each other’s smokes. Augspurg was no longer a student

when this photograph was taken, but she had only recently grad uated (with a law degree) from the university in Zurich. She had not pursued her studies in Germany because women did not have access to advanced education there at that time. The promi nence of cigarettes in this photograph of “students” and in pho tographs of (and by) other New Women registers the re-coding of such male accessories as signifiers of women’s liberation— not to mention lesbianism. That the students in this photograph are all women represents a new development in both education and group portraiture, where “student” had been an exclusively male signifier. Elvira was a pathbreaking enterprise in many ways, but it was not unique. Within this turn-of-the-century time frame, woman-owned photography studios cropped up all around Eu rope and America. These studios played important roles in women’s struggle for civil rights, including rights to self-defi nition and self-representation. By the same token, women owned photography studios participated in the formation of lesbian communities and the codification of lesbian visibility. Surviving photographs by lesbian photographers record an in ternational history of significance to all women, but particularly meaningful for women-loving-women. Like Elvira Studio, a studio founded in 1895 by Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg in Horten, Norway, specialized in portraiture. And like Goudstikker and Augspurg, Berg and Høeg were mil itant feminists. Høeg founded the the Discussion Society, asso ciated with the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, where women from the Horten community learned to engage in political debate. Høeg also sat on the Horten Women’s Council, associated with the Norwegian National Women’s Council. In addition to the portraits that provided their livelihood, the couple developed a noncommercial sideline in their free time. Using props and painted backdrops, they staged irreverent scenes featuring themselves, family members, and friends at play. One photo shows Høeg with cropped hair, dressed only in woolen underwear, crouched face-to-face with a dog whose pos ture she imitates. In another theatrical photo, Høeg and Berg appear together knee-to-knee in a stage-prop rowboat (Figure 6). The setting and props recall those created two or three decades earlier by the pioneering English photographer Julia Fig. 6: Marie Høeg & Bolette Berg, 1895-1903. Preus Museum, Horten, Norway.

May–June 2025

21