Donna Gottschalk

Born in 1949, the American photographer Donna Gottschalk grew up in New York’s Alphabet City neighborhood, where her mother ran a beauty salon. In 1967, she graduated from the High School of Art and Design before entering the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art the following year. She joined the Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and took part in the action led by the lesbian feminist organization Lavender Menace to protest at the convention of the National Organization for Women against the exclusion of lesbians from the feminist liberation movement. 

She moved to San Francisco in 1971 with her sisters Myla and Mary, where she became a cab driver. In California, she continued her photography and activism. In 1974, she joined the photographic printing company Action Photo Service in San Francisco, before moving to Connecticut, where she set up her own laboratory with her partner. In the 2000s she became a caregiver and moved to Vermont.

In 2018, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York devoted its first exhibition to her. In 2023, Donna Gottschalk met the researcher and writer Hélène Giannecchini, with whom a dialogue began and who organized an exhibition of her work at the Galerie Marcelle Alix in Paris in the spring of the same year. 

The exhibition We Others at LE BAL features a selection of unseen images and is her first solo show in Europe. Her work is held in private and public collections in the USA and France (ICP, Cnap, Kadist). Throughout her life, Donna Gottschalk has continued to photograph those closest to her, her brothers and sisters, queer people, butch, fem, trans, gay, activists, comrades, and friends.