Joan E. Biren, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians

Joan E. Biren’s work serves as an anthology of queer individuals throughout the 1970s and 80s, captured as part of her comprehensive series titled *Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians*. Her first photography book is structured around images that balance the strength of protest with the gentleness of nurturing a home and family. In popular media, queer people are often depicted in extreme contexts, creating an impression that their struggle is endless and that there is no history beyond protest. Biren aimed to portray lesbians—and, by extension, the entire queer community—as more than just their resilience. The women she documented led unapologetically ordinary lives, filled with sleeping, singing, laughing, mothering, and working. Biren's work was revolutionary for its time, challenging the subjects she photographed by dismantling the barriers of doubt. The façade they maintained in the outside world became irrelevant. A dedication by Biren in the book's introduction states in bold "Thank you for your courage and your trust". As Biren once stated, “A movement can't be built inside a closet.” Biren began her career as a photographer within the "Furies Collective," a commune of lesbian feminists in Washington, D.C alongside other nominal feminist artists and scholars such as Rita Mae Brown, Coletta Reid, and Sharon Deevey. They believed that lesbianism was primarily a political act rather than merely a sexual identity. This group aimed for a level of self-reliance that allowed queer women to avoid dependence on heterosexual norms present in the workforce and traditional concepts of the nuclear family. This idea of consistently questioning and or redefining what being a lesbian means is integral to the thematic narrative of Eye to Eye. Cast alongside the portraits are brief quotes from each individual responding in at times very distinctive ways to what lesbianism in daily life is representational of.

Susan Smith discusses how physical labor, particularly powerlifting was a way of connecting more deeply with her sexuality and more importantly defining herself as non-dependent on a male counterpart or potentially being physically intimidated. Dot Palmerton, a cook, has aspirations of opening a gay restaurant because quote "Why should somebody spend straight money and give it to gay people?" Claudia McCarthy worked through alcoholism by relying on her lesbianism as a source of strength stating "It's the one thing I've never doubted". Sexuality exists in this way as much more than attraction but a lifestyle and in times of great distress a means of protecting yourself from a world that seeks to so readily rigidly define you and in doing so forget about you. Following her involvement with the Furies Collective which disbanded in 1972 only a year after its initial founding. Biren continued working towards the completion of Eye to Eye traveling across the US she stated “Wherever lesbians gathered, where I could take pictures, I would be there.” The book was published in 1979, and following publication Biren toured the US producing a slideshow presentation titled Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–1984 detailing historic works by female artists such as Berenice Abbott and Alice Austen to predominately female audiences at various universities and community centers. Shows how Biren's work exists in conversation with female photographers before her time and through that, especially in the case of Alice Austen and other queer photographers how understanding the role that sexuality plays in the art-making process is not a modern "phase" to be disregarded but a longstanding tradition.

One of the first photographs Joan E. Biren took was a portrait of her and her lover Sharon kissing, having never encountered photographs of women kissing she created her own. \

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