One of the very first photographs by Joan E. Biren—the award-winning documentary photographer, filmmaker, and arguably one of the most pivotal contributors to lesbian culture—is a selfie, capturing Biren and her lover Sharon Deevey mid-clinch, the pair indistinguishable save for the bandanna rolled and tied around Biren’s forehead. Today we need go no further than our phones for the ability to mindlessly scroll through images of queer people being cute and in love, but in the 1970s, when the picture was taken, images of women adoring women (or men adoring men) were a different proposition altogether. Which brings us to the fact that Biren’s seemingly candid capture was in fact a thoughtfully planned political statement: The photograph was published in 1979 in her debut photography book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (Glad Hag Books). The pages were filled with portraits of lesbians at work, at home, embracing, performing Wiccan rituals, making art, playing music, building homes, raising families, and being in love. These were scenes of daily life, intimate and vulnerable pictures of lesbians as everyday people surrounded by their community and culture, often accompanied by their names and brief statements about their lives and experiences. In 1987, Biren published a sequel of sorts, Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front.

Biren grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in the Washington, D.C. area. Representation was lacking. “I couldn’t picture being a lesbian, life as a lesbian, because there were no lesbians living out lives to see,” Biren says. She was active in politics on her college campus at Mount Holyoke (this past May, Biren received an honorary doctorate in fine arts). After college, she taught herself photography through a correspondence course and her job at a camera store. She first came out publicly in the ’60s and later again when she met Deevey. They were among the founders of a Washington, D.C.–based lesbian collective called the Furies, which lived communally, sharing clothing, cars, money, and lives.

Today, Biren’s home doubles as her photography archive. The furnished basement houses a cabinet stacked with a dozen 4-inch-thick binders of 2,000 contact sheets and negatives dating from the early 1970s to the 1990s. Still more boxes are filled with 8×10 prints, and another room holds filing cabinets packed tight with lavender folders organizing yet more photographs. As we flip through the mountains of contact sheets and images of music festivals, community events, and political demonstrations, Biren reminisces on the people (“I mean lesbians; let’s be clear”) she’d photographed over the years.

In the 1970s, Biren toured the United States, chronicling lesbians at women’s events ranging from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, anti–Ku Klux Klan demonstrations, women’s writing workshops, sporting events, lesbian-separatist communities, and gay and lesbian pride marches. “Wherever lesbians gathered, where I could take pictures, I would be there,” Biren says. And by making the lives of lesbians visible, she ensured that their history would be seen.