Fotograf Magazine

Paris’, Gertrude [Stein] said, ‘was where the twentieth century was’, ‘the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth-century art and literature”. It is in this Paris of the interwar period that Diana Souhami portrays those that, according to her, contributed con-siderably to the inception of Modernism and yet have been time and again written out of history: lesbians. An experienced biographer, Souhami, in this publication juxtaposes “the lives of four women within the lesbian category”. Much more than a mere biography, this book is a complex convolute of facts, stories and quotes densely woven into one another. Similarly, the ‘lesbian category’ only functions as an envelope for a colorful bouquet of women that love women in an inexhaustible variety of arrangements.