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SUMMARY
The following photo/text work is an extract from a much larger installation of photographs and text. The photographs have a modified generic quality: colour landscapes and self-portraits in tourist sites across America, the images similar to postcards or amateur tourist/family photographs. The stories, by contrast, are grounded in an individual specificity of response to the sites and events of the trip to function as allegorical anecdotes. The work conjoins a personal, lesbian and poetic narrative with familiar and potentially mundane images. The format of the tourist plaque is an appropriation of the trope of ‘official’ authority that uses such markers to direct and define what is currently and historically significant.
The work explores questions of: the ambiguity of identity through association, lesbian invisibility, cross gender play, homo/lesbo eroticism, women'S access to and ownership of public space, the imaginary of the ‘road trip,’ landscape in photography, the documentary function of photography, photographic history, heterosexual assumption, etc. The work constructs a lesbian cognitive map of space, place, memory and history. The work (initially) appears simple in presenting familiar imagery with personal stories that explore theoretical ideas of lesbian subjecthood.