Jean and Elaine, Santa Fe, NM, 1988
American photographer Sage Sohier, whose portraits of facial paralysis patients were previously featured, has another equally moving series featuring same-sex couples at home.
Titled ‘At Home With Themselves: Same-Sex Couples In 1980s America’, it comprises beautiful black-and-white photographs of gay and lesbian couples taken in the mid 1980s.
Shot against a backdrop of fear and uncertainty over the transmission of AIDS, Sohier said she was moved to think about the lives of homosexual people.
“All these men were dying of AIDS and it was heartbreaking. And I was thinking about my gay friends and the gay community, and that provided an extremely poignant backdrop against which to photograph these couples,” she told The New York Times.
What started as a collection of six portraits taken in 1986, became a long-term cross-country project that saw her journey across the US to photograph gay couples in their homes.
Through ads placed in gay newspapers, Sohier sought subjects to interview and shoot, chatting with them over the phone before setting up sessions.
Some of the couples she photographed include high school sweethearts Lloyd and Joel from San Francisco, who were in their mid 40s and had been together for 25 years when their picture was taken in 1987.
Another couple, George and Tom from Key West, Florida, had told her that their union was forever. She returned in 2002 to photograph them, 15 years after the original picture, and they were still together.
Those images are now compiled in a book and an exhibition currently on view at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
Looking back, Sohier said her series was a way of connecting with her father, a World War II veteran who left her family when she was a toddler, and had a string of live-in boyfriends until his death in 2008. He was gay but never spoke of it.
She finally worked up the courage to meet him at the invitation of his partner, a ballet dancer turned painter named Lee.
Though fearful and not knowing how he would react, she showed him her photographs, and he teared up and seemed grateful.
“There was a sense of relief. I felt that I was sort of saying to him that I understood what was going on and that I was O.K. with it.”
Scroll down to see a selection of images, and view more at her website.
Doris and Debie, with Doris’ daughter Junyette, Los Angeles, 1987
David and Eric, Boston, MA, 1986
Stephanie and Monica, Boston, MA, 1987
Tim and Chuck, Key West, FL, 1987
[via The New York Times, images via Sage Sohier]