CAROL NEWHOUSE

Carol Newhouse, self-portrait from an Art and Photography Workshop, Womanshare, summer 1975.

For this year's Les Rencontres d'Arles, Objektiv's editor Nina Strand curates the exhibition Double with Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant, featuring this image by Carol Newhouse as her current afterimage.

‘Is it possible to leave everything behind? Is it possible to begin again, outside and beyond every system of living you've ever known, reinventing what it means (and looks like) to exist as a body and soul on the land?’ These questions shaped Carmen Winant's exploration of radical reinvention, particularly within the context of the lesbian separatist communities of the 1970s. Through this process, Winant connected with Carol Newhouse, co-founder of Womanshare, a lesbian feminist community on the West Coast of the United States. Winant’s and Newhouse’s ongoing dialogue has evolved through several collaborative projects that examine the transformative impact of feminist movements from that era, viewed through the lens of Newhouse's photographic practice and archive. The medium became an essential tool for Newhouse, allowing her to assert and control her own representation.

For Les Rencontres d'Arles, they've created unique new work that weaves together their stories, passions, and curiosities. Over the course of a year, they engaged in a photographic dialogue—one would shoot a roll of film, wind it up, and send it across the country, where the other would expose it once more—using the technique of double exposure to create a layered interplay between their images. Double exposure was a technique used by Newhouse and her comrades to play with the singularness of pictures, or the claim of a single (often masculine) art creator.

Through this creative collaboration, the artists reclaim feminist photographic strategies. With a fulcrum in a series of images by Newhouse from the very beginning of the community, Winant and Newhouse invites us to consider how we reinvent ourselves and our histories—both individually and collectively—through the act of self-representation and interconnection. Their visual conversation delves into intergenerational relationships and feminist political legacies while bringing the experimental photographic practices of the past into the present.