NOTHING BUT THE GIRL: The Blatant Lesbian Image — A Portfolio and Exploration of Lesbian Erotic Photography, edited by Susie Bright and Jill Posener, essays by Susie Bright, hardbound, 144 pages, Freedom Editions, 1996, $29.95.
In her introduction to Nothing But the Girl, editor Susie Bright describes her book as a love letter, and an impassioned letter of appreciation is just what Nothing But the Girl is — an expression of affection and gratitude, a gesture that attempts to acknowledge and repay the sort of overwhelming debt we feel to people or circumstances that have been pivotal in helping us realize something vitally important about ourselves, about our relationship to other people, about our essential place in the larger order of things, about daring to be fully and vibrantly alive. As Bright puts it, “I could not know what it means to be a lesbian if I had not seen the pictures in this book.”
This particular love letter, “not so much sentimental as revolutionary,” as Bright describes it, is directed not to any one particular lover but to something far more overreaching — in fact to two grander benefactors. To begin with, the love and appreciation that give Nothing But the Girl its heart and wisdom is addressed to women, to lesbian women, to the thing of being a lesbian woman affirming who she is in a hostile and negating world, especially to those lesbian women who dare to stand behind the uniquely erotic and sexual nature of their lesbian identities, politically and socially unfashionable as those essential natures may be.
Beyond this, quite clearly, is a second level of love and gratitude, addressed to those lesbian women who have endeavored to honestly and artfully capture the various complexities of lesbian erotic and sexual existence and experience on film — the women who have attempted to photograph the particular dynamic of opening heart, soul, cunt, and pulse woman to woman.
Beyond this, I suppose, one could say that Nothing But the Girl is also a celebration of the images these women have created, the small but growing body of vision that begins to bring the visualization of lesbian eroticism home from the manipulations and distortions of outside observers, to offer to lesbians and non-lesbians alike the confirmation and perspective that comes from witnessing the reality and complexity of one’s experience staring back from the photographic page.
What emerges from the collective impact of the images that Bright and co-editor/photographer Jill Posener have assembled here is a perspective that is delightfully diverse and complex — rich, real, and stereotype-busting as any genuine erotic experience, revealed in photographs that deserve to be called artistic, must invariably be.
One of the most powerful potentials of artistic creation is the ability of a truly artful photograph (or painting, or novel, or poem) to express (or reflect, or comment on) some fundamental truths about human experience, and to do so in a way that honors the rich, ironic, paradoxical, complicated, mysterious, baffling, wonderful, awful, nature of being alive. The difference between art and kitsch is that art sustains and celebrates the complexity of being human while kitsch reduces that often distressing reality to a simpler, easier to digest, easier to love or to hate, but pathetically less than honest, shadow of itself.
What is so wonderful about Nothing But the Girl is that, in addition to its celebration of lesbian women, lesbian photographers, and lesbian photographs, it is also a loving celebration of complexity, irony, paradox, and individuality — to the way real life, real people, and certainly real sex have of surprising you just when you think you have them figured out, nailed down, and conveniently categorized. The images in this book — the women, the emotions, the connections, the intimacies, the eroticism, the sex they display to the viewer — range from tough to tender, from lusty to romantic, from harsh to sweet, from documentary to impressionistic, from comforting to confrontative. There are photographs of women holding each other, embracing, kissing, or just looking at each other with loving eyes — as well as photos of passionate sex, fisting, piercing, and blood-letting. Whatever the form, the joy and wonder of erotic connection shines throughout. And even with those photos in which the subject could as easily be heterosexual as lesbian, the photographic point of view is unmistakably and continuously that of women viewing other women through the specific eye of erotic infatuation.
Whether the photographs in Nothing But the Girl reinforce, contradict, or entirely bypass media-driven clichés of lesbians, lesbian love, and lesbian sex, what is depicted here is anything but stereotypical. The women — whether they are older or younger, stocky or thin, aggressive or receptive, rejecting conventional notions of female beauty or rejecting that rejection — are unmistakably individual, personal, and real. If there is any one quality that seems to run through the subjects it would be a sense of inner strength, the kind of strength that comes from knowing who you are and daring to be yourself despite the inevitable social cost of that kind of personal integrity.
Along with that sense of strength comes the equally powerful sense of sheer personal presence that dominates photo after photo. In contrast to traditional, generally male-generated, erotic images of women, in these photos it is the strength of the women and the power of their personal identities that is the source of their erotic impact. Over and over again what draws us to the women in the photos is that they are unmistakably and unapologetically right there, in front of us, in front of the camera, complete with their proclamations of self, with their desire, with their desirability and — in photos where two or more women are together — with their deep and generally impassioned connection to each other. As a result, the experience of meandering through the images in Nothing But the Girl offers the viewer, any viewer — even a predominantly heterosexual male viewer like myself — an important personal confirmation: hope and encouragement for each of us to dare to be precisely who we really and most deeply are, both personally and sexually.
Nothing But the Girl is divided into four thematic sections, followed by five short portfolios by individual photographers — Tee Corinne, Honey Lee Cottrell, Della Grace, Morgan Gwenwald, and co-editor Jill Posener — selected from the 34 photographers whose work is represented in the book as a whole. Personally, I found the longer thematic sections — “Dyke,” “Butch,” and “Sex” — to be the most effective, while the shorter chapters (“Cunt” includes just eight photos; the portfolios six to ten images each) tended to close before they could build as strong an impact.
Bright’s introduction, together with her essays that run through the book, offer illuminating historical, cultural, and personal background to the book. The inclusion of short quotes from various photographers, in which they speak about their lives and their work, also ground the imagery of the book in the immediacy of personal experience. And the overall graphic composition of the book — the result of designer Roy Trevelion working cooperatively with the editors — imaginatively integrates images with text, and provides enough variation in the presentation of the photographs — large, small, individual, multiple, black and white, color, accompanied by text, standing alone — to keep the reader from sinking into habitual or repetitive patterns of seeing.
The photodocumentation by women of women’s desire and of women’s desire for other women is indeed a revolutionary and seditious act, since it essentially represents seizing the means of cultural production by a group that has traditionally been denied the right to shape collective reality and perception on its own terms. Let there be no mistake about it: Art is as powerful a force in shaping and controlling human experience and behavior as any of the other grand social dynamics — economics, politics, or religion.
The existence and distribution of photographic images that speak truthfully about lesbian eroticism and sexuality is an essential process of affirming the reality of lesbian sexual power and intensity in the face of the persistent efforts of those who would deny, distort, simplify, and trivialize this reality away. that is what makes Nothing But the Girl such an important and radical — as well as a simply beautiful and moving — book. If Nothing But the Girl is Susie Bright and Jill Posener’s love letter to lesbian erotic love and those who portray it on film, it is more than worthy of a few love letters of its own.
Spectator, November 1, 1996
Copyright © 1996 David Steinberg
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