Weak ties and soft power: seeing queer networks in the southwest

This paper takes up the connections between the individuals Laura Gilpin photographed over her sixty-plus-year career as a portraitist, reconstructing a network of friendships and collaborations developed and sustained over decades to reveal the extensive network of queer women embedded in her archive. Some of those women openly identified as lesbian or bisexual; others chose careers over public romantic partnerships; and some simply remained single throughout their lives. Universally, they understood themselves in relation to one another, a committed community of women supporting one another professionally and making space for remarkable expressions of intimacy and care.<br/><br/>Gilpin sustained herself and her partner Betsy with portraiture, which provided a reliable source of income against which she could create more speculative and ambitious artistic projects. With some exceptions — for instance, her portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe — this aspect of her work has largely been overlooked. The cataloguing of Gilpin’s archive has reinforced this oversight, since it records little or nothing about the motivations behind the individual portraits. This lack of detail leaves even serious scholars with the initial impression that they were all commercial transactions with little connection between them. When art historical attention has been paid to Gilpin’s portraits, it has focused on photographs that seemed to carry more aesthetic or social import, either in Gilpin’s eyes or those of the critics who evaluated her work in relation to the emerging modernist photographic canon over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. Overwhelmingly, the impression that gets created in both museum and academic contexts is that Gilpin’s portrait photographs were commercial transactions with little connection between them. <br/><br/>This is not entirely unjustified: Gilpin herself understood her project in terms of taking photographs of individual friends, family, clients, and colleagues — not of demographic categories. In contrast to later photographers such as Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, and Jenny Irene Miller, Gilpin only once set out to document a community in ethnographic terms, for her book on the Pueblos. Tellingly, it was a project she later second-guessed, and when she renewed her work on The Enduring Navaho after World War II she emphasized her own and her readers’ imperative to engage with “the individuals.” Nonetheless, if one explores the connections between the individuals Gilpin photographed, groups and networks do appear. Some are fairly predictable: the wealthy, middle-class members of her parents’ and her own social circle in Colorado Springs, where she grew up, for example, or the network of artists that grew out of her study at the Clarence H. White School in the 19-teens. Others are both surprising and frankly revelatory: Gilpin’s extensive and abiding network of queer women across the country is one of these. <br/>