Over the last decade or so, various projects have invited new audiences to engage with the groundbreaking lesbian photography practices that took root in the feminist 1970s and flourished throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Through the circulation of images on social media platforms, and in exhibitions and print publications, this renewed engagement manifests networked herstories of lesbian image making. In this paper, I propose the term ‘dyke research’ to capture the affective attachments signalled by these projects and the queer labour that they entail. Looking at how herstories have been historically important to the project of making lesbian images, I will focus on a series of projects that staged herstories of lesbian photography as a process of learning in and for the present. Sewn through this paper are my own encounters with lesbian photography practice as a dyke researcher. In this way, the act of researching is connected to embodied experiences of spectatorship and community - experiences that I argue are integral to the preservation of these histories and the new forms of dyke practice that emerge from them.

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