Among its most compelling works are portraits, such as those by JEB and the photographer Diana Davies, that constituted some of the earliest widely distributed images of 20th-century queer life. Often in black and white, these photos chronicle moments of everyday tenderness between LGBTQ people, especially lesbians, as well as historical landmarks (including, of course, the Stonewall Inn). In one particularly striking JEB photo, taken in 1980, the lesbian feminist poet and scholar Audre Lorde reads at a podium. Lorde is jubilant, the movement and power of her words captured with palpable reverence and affection in JEB’s print. (The photographer also documented Lorde’s friend and collaborator, the poet Pat Parker.)

JEB’s portraits, and much of the other work in “Art After Stonewall,” is both implicitly and explicitly political. The photographs range from images of lesbians kissing outdoors to a depiction of nude women gathered at the “Ovular,” a feminist photography workshop. In addition to JEB’s photographs, the show also includes copies of The Furies, the newspaper published by the lesbian separatist collective she and others formed in 1971. The documents, like the photographer’s self-portrait, are at once sly and provocative—they wink at knowing in-group members while shirking outside attention. The radical feminist periodical off our backs, for example, is invoked by the presence of On Our Backs, the first widely distributed lesbian erotica—a sexual milestone that also celebrates queer women’s bodies and the tensions they held. In reflecting an ongoing movement, these works also enabled its growth.

Indeed, the Washington, D.C.–area photographer has said she first identified as a propagandist, then as an artist. JEB conceived of her photographic mandate as inseparable from the project of historical record-keeping, of bringing queerness out of the shadows. “I wanted to be a photographer in large part because I needed to see images of lesbians, and it was a visceral thing. I wanted a reflection of my reality, and I think everybody wants that,” JEB told the historian Kelly Anderson in 2004 as part of Smith College’s Voices of Feminism Oral History Project. “My experience is that there’s an enormous hunger among people to be able to see themselves.”

She continued:

I really felt like my camera was a barometer of the climate of the times, because it got easier and easier and easier to, as people came out and the movement grew and people felt more comfortable. So that there was a synergy there between me putting out the images, people seeing that people weren’t immediately, hauled off to jail or whatever their fears were, that people didn’t lose their jobs, that I was careful and respectful. ... We were not a visible community. So I was making something visible and the more it became visible, the more it encouraged other people to be visible.

Though more than four decades have passed since JEB began her catalytic work, her initial mission remains relevant, if also complicated by the nonlinear progress of various queer movements. For LGBTQ people, the stakes of being seen have always been high—at times, a matter of life and death.