In March, Proof: Photographs Documenting Lesbian Life, a new exhibition featuring the work of photographer Angela Brinskele is set to open at One Gallery in collaboration with the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood, California.

As a longtime volunteer, board member, and now the Director of Communications for the Archives, Brinskele has spent her life dedicated to documenting and preserving lesbian life and culture. This exhibition will honor Brinskele’s important work, centering images of the local lesbian community engaging in pride marches, protests, celebrations, and casual gatherings—as well as several from her time photographing on the set of The L Word, whose premiere had a profound impact on Los Angeles’ lesbian community.

Growing up in Orange County, Brinskele began photographing as a teenager; she and her friends were interested in making pictures of the different stars and starlets who buzzed around the city. In college, she fell in love with photography as an art form and turned her camera to her own community. Like many lesbian photographers, Brinskele’s motivation to document was intrinsic; she understood the urgent miracle of photography—the medium gave her the nearly magical ability to stop time; she took care to observe and photograph important moments shared by her community, allowing them to live on forever in her film and prints.

Brinskele hasn’t put her camera down since she began documenting in the mid-1980s. She began photographing Pride in 1984 and hasn’t missed a single one since. She’s photographed events at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, for Women on a Roll, Dinah Shore Weekend, and protests like the 1991 March in Sacramento over AB101.

However, despite bearing witness to so many important and historic moments, Brinskele wasn’t always sure there was an audience for her work. In a 2013 interview with Ben Sher for UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, Brinskele says, “I thought I was the only one for most of my life, until I was about 16. So when I got to college and studied photography I wanted to document our community, especially women and lesbians, because I wanted to make really, really sure that nobody else felt that they were the only one on the planet…I used to look at my pride photos for years in boxes and think ‘I love these,’ but I was sure that nobody else would ever care about them.”*

It wasn’t until 2006, when Brinskele became involved with the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, she realized there were indeed many, many people who cared about her images. In fact, there was so much support that in 2013 Brinskele donated a selection of several hundred prints to bolster the Archives’ contemporary photographic collection. As time passed, Brinskele remained involved with the Archives, first as a volunteer, then as a Board Member, and now as the Director of Communications, overseeing marketing and donor engagement. This exhibition will be a celebration not only of Brinskele’s important photographic visions, but also of her longstanding dedication to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives and their mission of preserving lesbian life, community, and history.

*See full article at: csw.ucla.edu/2013/09/16/from-the-june-l-mazer-lesbian-archives-angela-brinskele

The exhibition will open on Saturday, March 21st with a reception at 2PM at One Gallery in West Hollywood, CA. The exhibition will be on view through Sunday, April 19th. One Gallery is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 1-7PM.

Bell Beecher Pitkin is a lesbian photographer, artist, and curator from Charlotte, North Carolina who lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. Within their practice, Bell works primarily with medium format film photography, exploring the intersections of identity, desire, and imagination. Bell received their BA in Cinema and Media Studies with a concentration in Photography from Wellesley College in 2023. See their website at beecher.cargo.site.

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