The invisibles: Vintage portraits of love and pride




The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century/ Sebastien Lifshitz, Rizzoli 2014, $ 27.50.
A charming collection of vintage photos of gay couples privately and often secretly celebrating their relationships. This volume is a unique collection of photographs of gay couples from 1900 to 1960. While this is a time many now regard as the deeply closeted "dark ages," these photos show gay couples who were clearly out (at least for a moment)-some camping it up for the cameras while others in loving or clearly domestic poses.

These photographs were discovered and collected by the author at flea markets and garage sales, the names of the subjects and their photographers lost to time. He was intrigued by the fact that the pictures show couples posed hand in hand, revealing happiness, serenity, and a surprising air of freedom so unlike the image of gays suffering in secret or fighting for their rights. This unique collection inspired Sebastien Lifshitz to restore to these nameless couples their voices in his documentary movie The Invisibles for which he was awarded the Cesar Award for Best Documentary in 2013. This Photoalbum had to be kept secret for 60 years

Sebastien Lifshitz has spent the past 30 years obsessing over vintage photgraphs and collecting endless amounts of photo albums from flea markets and thrift stores around the world.
The photos were reportedly taken between the 1900s and the 1960s, a period which many was said to have taken to calling as “the deeply closeted ‘dark ages.’”
Twenty years ago, in the Vanves market, Paris, he came across a photo album of two old women. “I couldn’t figure out the relationship between them,” he says. “Were they sisters? Friends? Lovers?” He asked the seller if he had any more pictures of the pair, and he produced 10 more albums. Lifshitz bought the lot for ¤50. The shots spanned 30 years, and featured no children or men, just these two women, together. “I realised very quickly they were lovers,” Lifshitz says. “The way they held each other, the way they looked at each other.”


He then set about collecting shots of anonymous gay couples from the start of the 20th century, and has now put them together in a book, The Invisibles. “So much of gay history focuses on the struggle and tragedy of the past, and of course that was true, but these images prove the reality was more complex. They show a freedom and a happiness for those brave enough to take pictures of who they were.
The book includes shots whose subjects are clearly gay, some who might have been gay and others who were playing. “It’s interesting to see homosexuality in everyone’s lives in some way,” he says. “It wasn’t an absolute taboo.” He found most of his collection in the US and western Europe, but none in the UK: “Maybe the British think such photographs have no value, or are too private to sell.”

Lifshitz has long been fascinated by what it is to be old and gay. “The media focuses only on youth, and Aids killed so many of the generation before me, so there is no one to pass down that legacy. A lot of gay people my age feel a bit orphaned.”
The project has given him the answers he’s been searching for: “I found a part of my past.
In an interview with Huffington Post, Lifshitz said that he wanted to present these photographs the way he discovered them – that is, “without any information like mysterious pictures.” He didn’t even put a caption in the photographs simply because he didn’t have the proper information about each of them.

This discovery intrigued Lifshitz and led to him filing a documentary entitled Les Invisibles (2012).

Sébastien Lifshitz Documents Hidden LGBT Relationships From The Early 20th Century

Sébastien Lifshitz (Wikipeda)

Pictures of the week: The Invisibles, by Sébastien Lifshitz


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