Donna Gottschalk, Photographer of Lesbian Love

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These are girls we don't usually look at, or even see. Furtive, they escape our gaze, shifting, they slip between genders. Photographer Donna Gottschalk captured them in the late 1960s in her Alphabet City neighborhood in New York, an island of poverty and violence at the edge of the East Village. Donna is one of them, a young lesbian fiercely determined to live as she is.

Throughout her life, she photographed those around her and those she loved: friends, lovers, roommates, neighbors, brothers and sisters. An exceptional record over time of a world caught up in a repressive everyday life, at the bottom of the ladder. A queer world before its time, on the margins, workers on the edge, invisible. The exhibition at the Bal , in Paris , " Nous autres", highlights this unsuspected world of modernity, freedom and friendship. In a black and white documentary style, with images from