Drawing the Line by Kiss & Tell (1990)
It is my opinion that photos are not a reflection of reality. This day and age we have a device with us constantly that can take photographs, but we tend to only use it to photograph things that look appealing. Just yesterday I was taking a photo of the cookie dough as I was rolling it out and stamping out the cookies. I thought I would take a picture of the process and although that sounds like a simple enough task, it took me much longer to find a decent angle, move anything that was unpleasant in the background, and make the composition look good around the dough. I say that I wanted to take a picture of a fond memory baking Christmas cookies, but once I uploaded that image to Instagram, I realized that I wanted to give off the impression I'm a good baker that keeps a tidy kitchen (which is not necessarily true).
These photos are very carefully crafted but when you closely look at the representations in the photos, you can see what they remember and what they forget. Photos in advertisements tend to forget race, class, sickness and old age, but they remember youth, wealth, health, etc. Subcultures want positive images to be taken of them. For some reason photographers tend to take photos of subcultures doing everyday things or the unpleasant sides of their everyday life. This is interesting because photographers don't tend to represent this in our culture. The amount of positive representation matters as well. Subcultures are not represented enough here, so whatever images photographers take will really stick with the viewer.
According to Jan Zita Grover in her essay, "Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs" lesbians in the 1960's and 1970's chose to downplay the sexual components in the lesbian communities and instead emphasize the spiritual and emotional side of their relationships. During this time there was still homophobia in the women's movement which may have been a factor. Alternatively, in the late 1980's, photographers were publishing images of lesbians that showed them embrace their sexuality. Of course, they were taking images like this throughout the years, but they finally started sharing them with others.
'Drawing the Line' was an interactive art exhibition by Kiss & Tell, a three-women art collective from Vancouver, British Columbia. Photos of two women engaging in sexual desires filled a suite and the public were allowed to comment on the walls around the art. The sexual acts ranged from just hugging and kissing to much more. People complained about all of the women in the images being white (because they were not aware the these were the same two women in each image). But many people were also taken aback by the sight of two women engaging in sexual activity together. The images in this exhibit were enacted by the two models and not actual images of them having sexual relations. I know some of them included representation of sado-masochistic sex, but a lot of the images were pretty tame and still considered "porn". Representations of relationships that you are not familiar with does not make them "porn". Lesbian relationships are underrepresented and are just unfamiliar to some, but that does not make them any less appropriate than a heterosexual relationship.
Works Cited
Jan Zita Grover, “Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs” (1991)
https://queerartsfestival.com/kiss-tell/ (Image Source)
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