In January 2023, Donna Gottschalk met writer Hélène Giannecchini for the first time. Although some 40 years separated them, an immediate connection was established between them. While searching for images for her upcoming book on friendship, Hélène explored Donna’s archives and collected her words, her story. Deeply moved by Donna’s life and photographs, Hélène set out to echo them. At the intersection of past and present struggles, the intersection of their two stories, personal and collective, provoked a shift in narratives.
Photography, art history, literature: their practices differ, but they share a common commitment: to making visible lives that have been kept outside of dominant narratives. This exhibition and this book, both entitled “Nous autres” (We Others), are the result of their encounter.
In the following interview, Hélène Giannecchini tells us about their relationship and Gottschalk’s work.
You are a writer, researcher, and contemporary art theorist, and, among other things, director of the Alix Cléo Roubaud Fund. Why did you become interested in Donna Gottschalk?
I discovered her work in 2023, when I was writing my book An Inordinate Desire for Friendship and looking for representations of friendship, particularly in the queer community, which wasn’t so easy to find. A friend, Isabelle Alfonsi, told me about Donna Gottschalk’s work, and I happened to be in New York at the time. I was lucky enough to be able to go meet her in Vermont, and I was absolutely amazed by what I discovered.
How did you approach her work and how would you describe it?
From the outset, I had a very personal and subjective relationship with Donna’s work since it was in her presence, in her studio. She showed me photographs, taking them out one by one, and told me that she and I were going to make a sort of pact: she was going to tell me all the stories contained in her images and then I was going to write them down. The questions of portraiture and intimacy are central to her approach, since she photographed those close to her, the people she loved the most, her family, her brothers and sisters, her friends, her neighbors, her lovers, but it is also a work on social classes. Donna was very interested in marginalized people, single mothers, immigrants, the homeless, this poor population of New York, as well as LGBT people. Her work encourages us to think about another way of conceiving art history, in order to highlight those who have not been looked at enough.
It escapes classic documentary photography. I have very rarely seen queer people photographed in this way since they are essentially captured by two types of iconography: activism on the one hand, and celebration on the other. This photography of everyday life inherits a certain American tradition that Donna has looked at a lot, but which she also transforms to find this proximity, this fragility, this emotion that emerges from her photos.
What surprised you most about discovering her work and conducting numerous interviews with Donna Gottschalk?
It’s how she remembers the people she photographed 50 years ago. She’s even able to quote their words, to describe their voice and intonation. What also surprised me is that she photographed what usually escapes our gaze, what is most tenuous in our bonds.
Donna was a lesbian activist, a member of the Gay Liberation Front, and marched in the Christopher Street march in the summer of 1970, the first Gay Pride parade in New York City. But she never captured the events directly; she didn’t photograph the activists at the podium, but those who listen; not the marches, but the hours spent waiting beforehand, at home with her friends. Her work also tells another story of the United States.
The exhibition “Nous autres” (We Others), presented at the BAL, brings together dozens of previously unseen images and is her first monographic exhibition in Europe. Why did she remain so anonymous for so long, particularly in the United States?
Because she chose not to show her work. Donna Gottschalk comes from a very working-class background and has had to work quite hard all her life to support herself and her loved ones. She worked in various jobs: driving a carriage in Central Park, waitressing, taxi driver… She then opened a silver halide print lab. When I met her, she had just turned 75 and was a caregiver. So she didn’t have the leisure to develop an artistic career. I don’t even know if she ever thought she had the right to one.
She also photographed her loved ones who lived on the margins of society: lesbian, trans, and gay people, the poor people in the neighborhood where she grew up. Donna believed that these people have suffered enough violence in their lives without wanting to share her images. Not showing them was, for her, a way of protecting those she loved most. But when we met in 2023, she was ready to do it.
American photographer and photography historian Carla Williams wrote a text in the book published by Atelier EXB. Can you tell us about the circumstances under which you met her?
I was in New York City, returning from a research trip to Donna’s home in Vermont, and my friend Moyra Davey recommended I see a Carla Williams exhibition at the Higher Pictures gallery. Like Donna, Carla had kept her work a secret for years. I was, again, dazzled by her work and struck, too, by the parallels between her story and that of Donna Gottschalk.
Carla Williams is a renowned art historian. But I didn’t know she had produced multiple self-portraits during her student years. Her work stems from a recognition of the lack of representations of Black women in art history. Since these photographs didn’t exist, she decided to take them. But after graduating, she didn’t show them to anyone for several years. The exhibition I saw in 2023 was the first since her graduation.
When I met Carla, she also told me that she had a photograph hanging above her desk. This image, which she had cut out of a 1980s magazine, had given her the courage to take photos of her own. In this image, taken by Diana Davis in 1970, we see a young woman posing during the Christopher Street march. She is holding a sign that reads, “I’m your worst fear, I’m your best fantasy,” and this young woman is Donna! Carla couldn’t believe she had lived with this photo in her home for years without knowing that this stranger was in fact Donna. I then arranged for them to meet in New York and Carla wrote a wonderful text about this meeting with Donna.
Should we see in the title of the exhibition and the book, Nous Autres, a way of reconsidering the queer community and the feminist movement in the United States?
The “we” in the title primarily encompasses Donna, her friends, and her loved ones, but it’s also the three of us: Carla, Donna, and me. It’s an affirmation of community, of connections, and of difference. It’s a We that emerges from the margins, that is a minority for various reasons; it’s a We that has sometimes had to fight and that is Other, compared to the dominant narrative. The exhibition and the book provide a perspective on the United States, as we need it, but resonate very much with what is happening in the United States today.
The exhibition “Nous autres” (We Others) is on view at Le Bal, in Paris, until November 16, 2025. The eponymous book is published by Atelier EXB and is available for €49.
This interview was conducted by Philippe Séclier for Atelier EXB.
