adayinthelesbianlife:

Donna Gottschalk’s “Brave, Beautiful Outlaws” is opening at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art on Aug. 29. While Ms. Gottschalk doesn’t identify as a documentary photographer or a photojournalist, she has been making pictures since she was 17. Photos selected from her 50-year personal archive will be made public for the first time.

Her work documents her closeness with her working class family and her involvement with the radical lesbian, sometimes separatist, communities in the late ’60s and ’70s.

The photos are tinged with mourning and mystery. She’s been holding their memory for decades, “fiercely protective” and unwilling to “subject them to scrutiny, judgment and abuse” from the outside world.

”Understand, people didn’t care about them or my pictures of them back in the day,” she said. “These people were all very dear to me, and they were beautiful. These pictures are the only memorial some of these people will ever have.”