Photography is framed as a time-shifting, materially fragile relay system in which lesbian feminist image-making (1970s–90s) emerges through messy collectivities, DIY distribution, and archival dispersal, while the camera’s presence inside images exposes the labor, mediation, and partiality of historical record. Against nostalgia, the text critiques identity-category consolidation and captioning/credit regimes through intersectional and Trans* analytics, foregrounding how whiteness, anonymity, and trans-exclusion haunt “lesbian photography” even as these images remain vital sites for re-reading power, consent, and community memory in the present.

Photography is framed as structurally entangled with violence—not only in what images depict but in the regimes of capture, surveillance, evidence, and circulation that make images legible to state power, occupation, and racialized policing, while also rendering systemic and legal violence largely unphotographable. Against the fantasy of the image as transparent truth or emancipatory proof, the text critiques how images become instruments of propaganda and control, proposing refusal (not producing/circulating) and sustained critical pedagogy as ethical-aesthetic strategies for rethinking photography’s complicity and limits.