ABSTRACT
Driven by the imperative to restore bodies and desires erased from the historical record, lesbian and gay liberation movements strategically prioritized visibility. The discipline of Gay and Lesbian Studies that emerged from those movements emphasized the documentation of historical existence through biography, memoir, oral history, and visual signifiers of presence such as portraiture. Berenice Abbott’s interwar photographs representing Paris lesbian notables (the bookshop publishers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, New Yorker magazine columnist Janet Flanner, vanguard author Djuna Barnes, Little Review editors Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, among others) contributed to the creation of new visual codes of gender presentation and gender representation. Between the two world wars, images of lesbians produced by Abbott and other members of her Paris expat community provided a foundational visual archive for lesbian activists of the next generation. For example, the photographer Tee A. Corinne appropriated Abbott’s work to produce a series of silk-screened posters that heightened the historical visibility of the cosmopolitan lesbian networks that formed in the early twentieth century. The posters pay homage to lesbians Corinne identified as ancestors, while providing women of her generation with alternatives to the prevailing female role models. Because Abbott’s photographs brought visibility to lesbian sexual culture and communities, Corinne both venerated and emulated the older photographer.
