That’s precisely what French screenwriter and director Sébastien Lifshitz explores in The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride ( public library | IndieBound), a remarkable collection of archival photographs - sometimes poignant, sometimes playful, invariably tender - of gay and lesbian couples privately celebrating their love in the early twentieth century. Toklas, but also experienced by a great many ordinary men and women alike. It was the role photography played for the LGBT community between the time of the medium’s invention and the first-ever Pride parades as it came to document, and validate by making visible, the love of queer couples - love reserved not only for such famous lovers as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Oscar Wilde and Sir Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Perhaps that is why photography, in its dawning decades, had a particularly poignant role for individuals and groups who were largely invisible to society. Before photography turned into excessive “aesthetic consumerism,” long prior to the narcissistic golden age of the selfie, it was a miraculous medium that granted one simple, fundamental human wish - the desire to be seen and, in the act of seeing, to be understood.
Any form of excess can usually be traced to the seed of a basic human longing.