GLR May-June 2025

Margaret Cameron, whose vignettes were in some cases pub lished as book illustrations. Were Høeg and Berg aware of their English proto-feminist precursor? Did they consciously inscribe themselves in her lineage? Such questions remain unanswered at present. However—indirectly, at the very least—a link ex ists, since Cameron was an innovator in photographic tech niques, styles, and genres that would enjoy popularity through out the late 19th century. Høeg and Berg’s rowboat scene also brings to mind Ab béma’s contemporaneous double portrait with Sarah Bernhardt, set in a skiff on a lake in the Bois de Boulogne. Here, however, the gender play is even more overt. Høeg, sporting male attire, holds the rowboat’s oars, while Berg, decked out in feminine finery, leans back against the stern. The stagy backdrop evokes a woodland setting; a ground cloth bunched around the hull of the rowboat enables us to imagine a turbulent stream. The cou ple’s hands, clearly visible, display what appear to be identical wedding bands. Although Høeg and Berg’s tableau has a tongue-in-cheek edge, unlike Abbéma’s grandiose double por trait, the photograph also, nonetheless, immortalizes a lesbian love story. Høeg and Berg closed their studio in Horten in 1903 and moved to Oslo (then Kristiania), where they founded an art pub lishing house specializing in postcards (a burgeoning industry) and photographically illustrated books on culture and society. Their publication list included career-focused books for women. Wherever photographic technologies were available, the camera offered women opportunities to shape new images of

themselves, to create new histories, and to give form to new so cial relations. Lesbianism and feminism often set the stage for women’s embrace of the photographic medium. As we have seen, photographic portraits by so-called New Women docu ment (one could say “invent”) relationships and forms of so ciability that were heretofore not authorized or acknowledged in male-dominant cultures. Thus far we have focused on professional practices. How ever, amateur and semi-professional image-makers participated in lesbian world-making projects as well. To cite just one ex ample, Alice Austen, an independently wealthy, self-taught pho tographer, made her relationships with other women the focus of a prodigious œuvre. Against the odds, quite a few of her thou sands of photographs have survived the indifference of institu tions and the disregard of heirs. These photographs reveal to viewers today the existence of a women-centered subculture in turn-of-the-20th-century New York. Austen and her circle of lesbian friends offered one another support, safety, and fulfil ment. She and her lover Gertrude Tate spent 56 years together, thirty of them in a home that is now the site of the Alice Austen House Museum, a nationally designated site of LGBT history and the setting for thousands of Austen’s photographs. The photographic œuvre includes “private” works as well as pictures of a public nature solicited principally by friends and friends of friends. Austen illustrated her friend Violet Ward’s book Bicycling for Ladies (1896), for instance. (Ward was co founder, with Austen, of the women’s bicycle club on Staten Is land.) For Ward’s Bicycling for Ladies , Austen photographed a mutual friend, the gymnast Daisy Elliott, demonstrating the proper (and dangerously incorrect) positions to assume on a bike when turning corners, coasting, mounting and dismounting the vehicle, and handling it for repairs. Although the practices of lesbian image-makers varied widely, as we have seen, it is nevertheless possible to come to certain general conclusions. Feminist demands for political and economic autonomy created a favorable climate for lesbian artists and photographers. Further, the allure of the camera for lesbians—a signifier of agency, of seeing and being seen— makes perfect sense at a time when women had little public presence and women-loving-women had no visibility. In the 19th century, the very existence of lesbians was not widely acknowledged. Lesbianism was denied by lawmakers (who feared that explicitly outlawing lesbian sexual practices would have the perverse effect of promoting them). Lesbianism was misunderstood by sexologists, doctors, and psychologists as a failed or ersatz form of heterosexuality. Families expunged traces of lesbianism from their photo albums and histories. Signs of lesbianism in art, theater, and literature were censored. These campaigns of effacement help to explain why lesbian photographers, as well as many of their sisters in the fine artists, privileged the practice of portraiture—a genre that manifests and validates the existence of individuals, couples, groups, com munities, and networks. In portraiture, lesbians elaborated the codes of identity that made them recognizable to one another and determined the conditions of their own visibility. Nine teenth-century lesbian portraiture makes a claim that may seem self-evident to us: “We exist!” At that time, as we would do well to recall today, such acts of self-representation were nothing short of revolutionary.

TheG & LR

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