We Others

Donna Gottschalk, born in 1949 in Alphabet City, a working-class neighborhood in New York, is a photographer. Since the late 1960s, she has endeavored to represent the people with whom she has lived, shared political activism, and worked. The development of Donna’s gaze is inseparable from the emerging movements for LGBT+ rights, in which she was involved at a time when homosexual relationships were still illegal in the United States.
Influenced in her early years by the work of Diane Arbus, which she discovered at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967 during the exhibition “New Documents”, Donna chose to photograph individuals on the margins, from the marginal position she herself inhabits. The individuals she photographs, in the intimacy of their daily lives, are never portrayed as objects of curiosity observed from a distance. In contrast to the dominant photographic approaches found in activist circles and the avant-garde New York scene of the 1970s, her work circulated outside conventional channels. Every gaze, every posture asserts “we are here, together, visible, united.” In 2018, her work was presented for the first time at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. After years of reticence, Donna feels that it is finally time to share her images.

Hélène Giannecchini, born in 1987 in Paris, is a writer and art theorist. Attentive to overlooked words and images, she devotes a major part of her research to queer memoirs and minority archives. When she first met Donna in 2023, an immediate bond was formed. In a spirit of trust, Donna provided access to her archives which she explored, reinterpreted and reassembled. Their personal and collective stories converged at the intersection between past and present struggles, sparking a shift in narrative. Her text, shaped as a journey, reveals, extends, and amplifies Donna’s work in the present.

Carla Williams, born in 1965 in Los Angeles, is an American photographer and art historian whose series Tender resonates with Donna’s work. As a young student, she became acutely aware of the near absence, within the history of photography, of images created by Black women. With the boldness to address this absence, she began a body of self-portraits within the intimate space of her bedroom. While drawing on certain codes of American modernist photography and vernacular culture, she does so to challenge and subvert their hierarchies. Like Donna, Carla contributes to shaping another history of representation.

It took decades for these images to finally reach us. Traces of existence, gestures of love and resistance, they do not merely ask to be seen. They engage us.

– Julie Héraut