DOUBLE Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant

The Promise, Carol Newhouse, 1974.

In a 2022 conference, On Wimmin's Land at Oregon University, Carol Newhouse talks about her experience at WomanShare, about sharing her life through photography—how she spent time in the funky little darkroom they built, staring in wonder at her photographs. She wanted to capture the strength she felt on the land. She reflected on how to create images that conveyed a sense of togetherness in an environment that was both healing and challenging. She talked about how all the women brought who they were to the lands and then negotiated who they became. She called WomanShare “a place of power,” where they could realize their full potential. As she spoke about slowly becoming visible to herself and to each other, I thought about how an analogue image emerges through the development process.

The vast number of publications produced by these Lesbian Lands—zines, pamphlets, magazines—demonstrate how photography became an important tool; making pictures became a way to reclaim and reinvent. Between 1979 and 1981, Newhouse was part of the Ovulars, a series of photographic workshops for women. (The word “ovulars” is a replacement for “seminars,” whose etymology relates to “spreading seed” or semen.) Over the course of three summers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, women met to take pictures, get inspired, and share ideas.

For her 2018 project My Birth, Carmen Winant extensively researched these intentional lesbian-separatist communities and became fascinated by the images that captured a radical movement toward lesbian self-determination. As she puts it, these photographs, created by and for women, reflect a world rooted in mutual recognition—women behind the camera, photographing one another, and building lives outside the structures of patriarchy. In this context, photography becomes both a survival strategy and a shared language—an archive of intimacy, pleasure, labor, and resistance.

I've often thought about what an Ovular workshop might look like today, particularly in terms of choosing one’s own representation and exploring the freedom that comes with it. And that is how their year-long dialogue began: during the first Zoom conversation, after receiving the green light from the Les Rencontres d'Arles team, Carmen, Carol, and I shared on screen this double exposure The Promise. Carol was sitting in her Bay Area living room, wrapped in the morning light from a window. Carmen was in her Ohio studio at noon, with some collages visible behind her. I was at a makeshift desk in my flat in Oslo at six in the evening. In a way, we were all on that beach—the images from that day becoming a fulcrum for Double—a dialogue between Carmen and Carol, an exploration of how to make work in this way.

An excerpt from Double Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant—published in conjunction with the exhibition Double at Les Rencontres d’Arles.