When Donna Gottschalk came out as gay to her mother, she replied: “You’ve chosen a rough path.” It was New York in the 1960s, homosexuality was illegal and, as the photographer reflects in a video piece included in her new exhibition We Others: “There were no happy gay people.” A photograph of Gottschalk’s mother in the beauty salon she ran in the notoriously crime-ridden Alphabet City appears at the start of the show, in which the images are accompanied by texts by the French writer Hélène Giannecchini, recording the photographer’s memories of the people and events depicted.
Gottschalk picked up a camera at 17, so these pictures also constitute her own awakening, as she accepted her identity and became involved with the Gay Liberation Front. It starts with family. Here is a painfully poignant image of Gottschalk’s sister, Myla, aged 11, the picture of innocence and peace, asleep in bed in the family’s apartment in a tenement building.
