Black-and-white slide

Open pages of an empty spiral-bound notebook. In the bottom half of the image, a person peeks out. We only see their forehead, diagonally, one eye glancing at the camera, lots of tousled hair, giving an air of a casual experiment. A self-portrait, with the face cut off, slipping out of the frame. Are the pages cushions for the head to rest on, or papery angel wings? Page, body, photograph. A scene-setting.

Black-and-white slide (×3)

A close-up of a boxer’s hands wrapping bandages around their wrist, framed by their bare chest. The gesture – composed, practised, tender yet firm – reappears in two other photographs, on different bodies, with different kinds of bindings.

Black-and-white slide

A studio portrait of a masc posing in eighteenth-century drag, wearing pointy flouncy Mozart shoes and holding a Venetian mask on a wooden stick. Flirtatiously commanding.

Colour reproduction

A crop of a larger medieval icon painting, with its characteristically gorgeous egg tempera opalescence. I should say I imagine its luminosity despite this lossy reproduction of a reproduction. I’m intrigued by the framing. What was cut out? The stars of this new frame are three angels with rose crowns in lapis lazuli gowns and huge wings with black feathery tips. One crosses her arms, looking suspicious, certainly unimpressed, while a hand reaches out to hold her shoulder from outside the cropped image. All three glance towards something or someone on the left. All three wear a stag brooch and the angel in the middle touches hers lightly, or maybe she’s pulling her sleeve up, there’s a flash of skin, while the angel on her right grazes her shoulder. They appear to be in cahoots, is she inviting touch there?

 Black-and-white slide

A studio portrait of someone with medium-long hair wearing a medieval leather jerkin, the left hand firmly holding a dagger stacked into the belt pointing to the crotch; the right hand holding a black placard with white lettering with a list of other kinds of icons: Queen Christina, Natalie Barney, Gluck, Romaine Brooks, Dorothy Arzner. A solid stance. The slide note titles it ‘The Knight’s Move’.

Black-and-white reproduction

A poster or magazine spread of blurry organic shapes in clusters, mostly circles with fuzzy edges. To the right, three rectangular boxes of close-ups ‘3a 3b 3c’, a bulging sphere growing from a surface, being pushed out or released then only loosely attached. At first glance, without reading, this could be an abstract painting, one mark looks like an eye, and then I see the small white lettering ‘HTVL-III’, the bar graph, the word ‘P A N I C’ in the corner.

Black-and-white slide, with a Kodak orange-red logo

A femme angel in a black box studio is reading a magazine, the heading on the page in caps LESBIANS & AIDS next to a humorous comic-book-style illustration. She’s seated, she’s got all sorts of stuff around her – a dildo, a toy crocodile (?), books, lube, safer sex leaflets. Next to her, her masc lover is wrapped in clingfilm, posing like the stone statue projected behind them. A photograph within a photograph.

Two colour slides, side by side

A group of people sitting on a picnic table in a park. It is sunny. They are smiling. Leaning against the table are colourful collages on large paste boards. A black marker on the slide mount states: Ley Community, 1991.

Multiple black-and-white slides in a slide sleeve

Two dykes making out in a bathtub. A leather-gloved hand grabbing their lover’s arse, pulling the cheeks apart, presented frontally to the camera. A portrait of a dyke with a moustache and a hat. A woman touching herself. A couple having sex, one of them has her head thrown back, the other has her latex-gloved hand between her partner’s legs. An image of a visitor’s book. Install shots. Photographs arranged like a map on a wall covered in comments by gallery goers: ‘I’M ABSOLUTELY BREATHLESS’.

Black-and-white reproduction

A photograph of a page in Alice in Wonderland: ‘“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.” Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was; at first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse, that had slipped in like herself.’

Black-and-white slide

A Saint Sebastian–like figure reclining in a bathtub, surrounded by draped white cloth, blood dripping from his chest, leaving a stain. A letter in his left hand, a feather in the other. The lighting is dramatic, full on chiaroscuro, tenebrist even. The image appears in a book, with the caption ‘Assassination’. Underneath, the lines:

The above image descriptions focus on 35mm slides and reprints of ‘research slides’ in Tessa Boffin’s archive at UCA Farnham and in a folder in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths. They’re drafts. I’m currently going through Boffin’s archive in the process of developing a newly commissioned lecture-performance and garment in response to her work. Boffin (1960–93) was a lesbian photographer and AIDS activist who combined fantasy with references to historical and art historical queer figures in her staged photographic tableaux vivants. I was particularly drawn to the sheer number of slides, their non-hierarchical adjacency, Boffin’s voracious curiosity across genres, mediums and modes. Thinking about the image description as a literary form, I felt it was apt to lean into Boffin’s own interest in language in relation to photography. In my attempt to get to know Boffin via her slides, her own research, I tried to stay close to the material, deliberately not (yet) revealing too much of what I know about her biography, her references, the specific cultural context she was working in.

The slides themselves provide little to no context beyond a title, name, and/or date (‘Quim magazine’; ‘Kiss & Tell’s Drawing a Line’; ‘A Lover’s Distance’; ‘Hinda Schumann, Dear Shirley, 1980’; ‘Sylvester Mittee by Eamonn McCabe’, etc.) and some contain no annotation. If the photographs are hers, she puts T. Boffin or TESSA BOFFIN, the T arching over the E. There are many untitled boxes, some include magazine cutouts of lesbian erotica, mainstream media reporting, advertising, safer sex leaflets, medical images, a science article; some contain reproductions of work by other photographers. Several references are art historical: one image, for example, is inspired by The Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. Another references the Wilton Diptych.

Some of the work in the archival slides was included in Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs (1991) that Boffin co-edited with Jean Fraser, and the exhibition and book Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (1990) co-curated and co-edited with Sunil Gupta; some material was very likely used or served as documentation of Boffin’s many slide-lectures and workshops.

I like Boffin’s work for its theatricality, its playfulness, and what I’d call – in relation to my own practice – theatre without theatre; what she once called ‘phototheatre’. Here, the phototheatre is the slide as stage, filled only with words.