We Others

LE BAL presents, for the first time in France, the work of Donna Gottschalk, Carla Williams, and Hélène Giannecchini. Three women from three generations, whose practices – photography, art history, literarure – differ yet share a common commitment: to make visible lives long excluded from dominant narratives.

Donna Gottschalk (b. 1949, New York) has, since the late 1960s, photographed those with whom she lived and fought, documenting the intimacy of LGBT+ communities at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the United States. Her images affirm presence and solidarity: “we are here, together, visible, united”. After decades of discretion, her archive was first revealed in 2018 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York.

Writer and art theorist Hélène Giannecchini (b. 1987, Paris) devotes her research to queer memoirs and minority archives. When she met Gottschalk in 2023, she gained access to her images, reinterpreting and reassembling them in a new narrative that bridges past and present struggles.

Carla Williams (b. 1965, Los Angeles), photographer and art historian, turned to self-portraiture to address the near absence of Black women in the history of photography. From the intimate space of her bedroom, she produced works that draw upon and subvert both modernist traditions and vernacular codes, asserting another history of representation.