We support a ceasefire in Palestine.
Laurie and Debbie say:
Legendary Lesbian photographer Tee Corinne was a close friend of Laurie’s and an admired acquaintance of Debbie’s. If you search this blog archive for her name, you’ll find dozens of posts, some that are about her work and some that mention her as an influence on other artists, plus some of Laurie’s musings on Tee’s illness and death in 2006.
Now, the first book about her has been published, Tee A. Corinne: A Forest Fire Between Us, edited by Charlotte Flint and published by MACK in the United Kingdom. In “Lesbians Unleashed: The Joyous, Sexually Explicit Photographer No Publisher Would Touch,” Rebecca Nicholson writes for the Guardian about Tee, and the book. That being said, Tee is certainly drastically under-recognized and underappreciated. Flint, who edited the new book, says
“I had never heard of Tee Corinne….” A chance encounter with an image brought her into Corinne’s charismatic orbit. She was at the Feminist Library in London when she came across an otherworldly photograph in which women’s bodies form an abstract, kaleidoscopic, solarised motif.
Tee was an extremely technically skilled and eclectic photographer: the early solarizations which caught Flint’s eye are balanced by both black-and-white and color portraits, many of them from an early 1980s feminist commune in Oregon where she made her home. The one thing that rarely varied was her subject matter–always women, generally Lesbians, who were (unsurprisingly) vastly under-represented in photography in Tee’s lifetime. She was also a tireless promoter of Lesbian art and culture; we both knew her because of her constant attendance at women’s art conferences and her completely focused insistence on Lesbian representation everywhere.
What is remarkable about Corinne’s work is that it seems instinctively intersectional, long before such a concept became more widely understood. The photographs depict, says Flint, “women of colour, bigger bodies, women with disabilities, women of all ages. She really wanted it to be the reality of what being a queer woman making love to another woman would be.”
Another reason Corinne’s work feels so vibrant today is that, with its depictions of women who lived on the fringes, it captures a period of social history that has so often been forgotten. Flint argues that, in refusing to print her work, the printers contributed to the suppression of this history.
One crucial exception to publishers’ rejection of Tee’s work is Ron Howard at Last Gasp Comics. Last Gasp has probably sold more copies of Tee’s The Cunt Coloring Book than of anything else he ever published, and it’s still in print today.
Just as Laurie and I were admirers of Tee as an artist and as a human being, Tee was an admirer of Laurie’s work and Laurie’s life. Tee said, “Women En Large … establishes a right to territory. [It], … at the clearest and deepest levels, asserts the right of fat women – and by extension, of all people – to exist.”
Laurie visited Tee often in Oregon during her last illness. This is the portrait she shot of her in August 2006.
(click on image for best quality)
We hope that Flint’s book is the first of many, and that other (as Flint describes them) “incredible artists with histories of political activism” benefit from this renewed interest in art and passion that should never have been suppressed or forgotten.
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