We Others

The work of Donna Gottschalk, virtually unknown in France, paints a social and political portrait of invisible America, from the late 1960s to the 1980s, that still resonates strongly today. Her sensitive and committed approach focuses in particular on people on the margins - young single mothers, teenagers at odds with their families, juvenile delinquents... - and on the queer community, to which she herself belongs. Donna Gottschalk shows those who receive little attention, those who live in economic and emotional fragility, those who suffer homophobia and social rejection. The book will weave a dialogue between Donna Gottschalk's images and Hélène Giannecchini's texts, recounting this America of the margins and giving voice to lives that are ignored.

It will be supplemented by a long interview between the two women and a rich critical apparatus, including previously unpublished archive documents and two essays by Carla Williams, American photographer and art historian, and Julie Héraut, co-curator of the exhibition to be held at Le Bal in summer 2025.

Donna Gottschalk (born 1949) is an American photographer whose work is closely linked to the documentation of the LGBTQIA+ and feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. Born in New York, she grew up in the Tenement Houses of Alphabet City. She began photographing her family at the age of seventeen, and in 1969 she enrolled at the prestigious Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the only free art school in the city. That same year, following the Stonewall riots, she joined the Gay Liberation Front and became an active member of the movement. In 1971, she moved to San Francisco, where she worked as a taxi driver. During these years, she took portraits of those around her and of couples and individuals considered marginal at the time, conscious of the need to bear witness to their lives through photography: transgender people, the poor, the homeless, sex workers and drug addicts. In the 1980s, Donna Gottschalk moved to Connecticut, where she set up a photographic printing laboratory with her partner. She now lives on a farm in Vermont.In 2018, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York devoted its first exhibition to her, Brave, Beautiful Outlaws, The Photographs of Donna Gottschalk, which was presented the following year at Blue Sky, Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts. Her work has been included in various private and public collections in the United States and France. She is represented in France by Galerie Marcelle Alix.