DOUBLE Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant

A page from the book Double Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant.

Double opens with a series of photographs of a woman practising Tai Chi on a beach, apparently alone, moving in and out of the waves. She seems lost in her own movements. The year is 1974, and the woman, along with her two friends, is weeks away from discovering the land where they will build a new community. They have left everything—their homes and families—to find a place where they can live outside society. This short photo-novel of the woman on the beach serves as a symbol of that dream.

And let this dream begin with Carol, who captured the series on the beach. In the 1976 book Country Lesbians, about the community they built, we learn that she and the woman on the beach, Dian Wagner, met in college and later lived with Carol’s then lover, Billie Miracle, in a collective in Nova Scotia. Wagner dreamed of returning to the States to buy land, envisioning a future where they could build a more sustainable and independent life. Later, Carol recalls that they didn’t feel as if they would need to give up very much. Even if they didn’t know where and what the land they eventually found would be, they were just filled with passion and a confidence that they would find something better. They knew they had to leave a system they felt was harmful to them.

(…)

This dream of a new future was something that Carmen also sought. For her 2018 project My Birth, she extensively researched the international lesbian-separatist communities and became fascinated by these images that capture 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, labour and resistance.

An excerpt from Double. Order your copy now at our online bookstore.