Week 12: Positive Images (Jan Zita Grover)

 

Blog Post Topic:

"Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs"

by Jan Zita Grover

Our shortest reading yet was this 6-page article from the magazine, “Stolen Glances, Lesbians Take Photographs,” called “Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs,” written in 1991. The key points in this writing were about the marginalized lesbian community which was (and still is) severely underrepresented. As I learned in Business Management, representation is a form of power. It’s empowering for us to see ourselves reflected in art, and the way that is portrayed is important, too. As Jan Zita Grover explains in this article, imagery and unseemly representation of these under-represented groups are more heavily scrutinized because there are less (or almost no) opposing examples to contradict and humanize them. Scarcity becomes a problem, Grover wrote, that leads to very few in the community meeting an expectation of their own reality reflected in a satisfactory way. The process to attempt correcting these imbalances may be an exhausting one but seems hopeful, nonetheless.

Photo from "Drawing the Line," Kiss & Tell, 1991,
The Kiss and Tell Collective consists of the Canadian artist and writers Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart
facebook.com/photo/?fbid=217646706342313&set=pcb.217646936342290

Another point that Grover went over was sexual content in photography. It seems limited to a point that the community itself uses sexually explicit content as a means of expressing their suppressed identities. There was one exhibit mentioned in the writing called, “Drawing the Line” by Kiss & Tell, which was a three-woman art group from Vancouver, British Columbia. They exhibited their series of photographs in San Francisco, which portrayed different sexual desires and performances which varied from hugging to bondage and voyeurism. The photos all had the same 2 women in them and there were black pens provided for women viewers to provide feedback. They were encouraged by wall labels to pinpoint where they would "draw the line" for what was considered pornographic. Men were invited to write their reactions in “The Men’s Book.” This social art exhibit proved to show some very nasty remarks about what they thought of the couple and how they tried to write over each other. It also showed that when art and new work does come to light, the reactions are typically intensely extreme. We can learn from this that the nature of these underrepresented groups getting so much attention and reaction means that there is active resistance to the change and eyes on this kind of topic. People notice right away when there is a new visible representation of a marginalized group, which means we really need more, not less, like Grover says in the end of her writing. There is a drastic need for more examples of marginalized groups, so we should be encouraging and accepting all the visibility these people can get.

Grover, Jan Zita. “Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs.” Essay. In Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, 184–90. London: Pandora Press, 1991.