Lesbians unleashed! The joyous, sexually explicit photographer no publisher would touch

In 1993, Tee A Corinne wrote that she was “close to being finished with sexual imagery”. Corinne was a prolific multimedia artist, activist, photographer and writer of erotica and autobiography. Much of her work involved what she called “labia imagery and … images of women making love with other women or with themselves”. After three decades of this, however, she was thinking about moving on. “I have thought this before but changed my mind,” she wrote. “Why? Because no one else was making the images I wanted to see.”

The images Corinne made, in part because nobody else was doing it, remain extraordinary, invigorating and quietly radical. Her Artist’s Statement: On Sexual Art is just one of many documents, posters, essays and letters gathered together by Charlotte Flint, editor of A Forest Fire Between Us, a new book collecting some of Corinne’s considerable body of work and the ephemera surrounding it.

Many of the photographs were taken during the early 1980s at a lesbian commune in Oregon, to which Corinne had decamped from San Francisco during a period of severe depression. There, she helped to facilitate retreats called feminist photography ovulars (“ovular” instead of “seminar”, which shares an etymological root with the word “semen”). The results depict women naked, clothed or semi-clothed, working, dancing, building, making art, having sex and being in nature. They capture a unique moment: the intersection of back-to-the-land communities, second-wave feminism and the women’s movement, and early gay rights activism.

Remarkably, this is the first book to have been published about Corinne, who died in 2006 of liver cancer, aged 62. “I had never heard of Tee Corinne,” says Flint, who spent years researching it, and has written an extensive essay about the artist. A chance encounter with an image brought her into Corinne’s charismatic orbit. She was at the Feminist Library in London when she came across an otherworldly photograph in which women’s bodies form an abstract, kaleidoscopic, solarised motif.

“You know when you see an image and you just can’t place it?” she says. “There was no way I could have told you if it was from the 30s, or if it was brand new.” It turned out to be from Corinne’s self-published 1982 collection, Yantras of Womanlove. Flint shows me a ragged copy. “It was so hard to get hold of. It just felt like people were waiting for a book on her.”

It wasn’t long before Flint was going “down the wormhole” of research, having discovered that the University of Oregon holds a substantial archive. “I was completely captivated,” she says. When she discovered that first photograph, five years ago, Flint was a curator, first at the Barbican, later at the Hayward, both galleries in London. She originally conceived of an exhibition, but the pandemic arrived. “I kept thinking, ‘Something will come of it’ – because she’s too amazing a person, the work is too incredible.” So she carried on with her research. A Forest Fire Between Us is the result of this labour of love.

Corinne was born Linda Tee Athelston Cutchin in Florida in 1943. Raised by her mother and stepfather, she later documented her difficult upbringing in the mixed-media work Family: Growing Up in an Alcoholic Family. She married a male folk musician in the 1960s, but moved to San Francisco and began coming out in 1973. Much of her work celebrates sex and intimacy between women.

Like Flint, I thought I had not heard of Corinne, but when I looked again, I realised I had seen her work before. The cover of Suede’s debut album, which features two androgynous figures kissing, is a Corinne photograph. She was also the author of the Cunt Coloring Book, a collection of drawings of female genitalia that became a minor feminist classic when it was first published in 1975. In 1981, the publisher changed its title to Labiaflowers, which caused sales to drop. The original title was eventually restored. “She would joke that she was the pin-up lesbian artist,” says Flint, “but that no one actually knew who she was.”

There are a number of explanations for this relative obscurity. For one, Corinne was rarely exhibited in her lifetime. “In the 1970s,” says Flint, “it was still very dangerous for people to make sexually explicit work depicting same-sex relationships. Queer women were totally outlawed in a heteronormative society.” Flint suggests the work, which often fell foul of US and sometimes international laws prohibiting sexually explicit imagery, was “maybe a bit too radical. People weren’t comfortable with it. Places wouldn’t show it.”

Corinne turned to self-publishing. “She described books as portable galleries with paper walls,” says Flint. Even then, it was hard for her to get the books printed. “Presses wouldn’t publish the material. It was a real uphill battle.” Corinne once submitted an image to a magazine, which accepted it for publication. “The magazine went to the printer, and they refused to print it. It was a woman going down on her partner and they called it ‘the lunchbox special’. So derogatory!”

The criticisms levelled at second-wave feminism are typically aimed at its focus on white, heterosexual, middle-class women. What is remarkable about Corinne’s work is that it seems instinctively intersectional, long before such a concept became more widely understood. The photographs depict, says Flint, “women of colour, bigger bodies, women with disabilities, women of all ages. She really wanted it to be the reality of what being a queer woman making love to another woman would be.”

Another reason Corinne’s work feels so vibrant today is that, with its depictions of women who lived on the fringes, it captures a period of social history that has so often been forgotten. Flint argues that, in refusing to print her work, the printers contributed to the suppression of this history. She returns again to her copy of Yantras of Womanlove. “Part of the reason it’s such poor quality is that it was originally going to be printed at one printing house. Tee signed it off and then they decided they wouldn’t print it because of the content. It was sent to a different printing house and they didn’t print it properly.” Clearly, the pages are falling apart. “It’s just astonishing, that the decision – or not – to print something is literally woven into the fabric of that book.”

A revival of interest in Corinne seems timely. Curators and publishers are starting to recognise these previously hidden or ignored artists and communities. In 2021, the Rebel Dykes archive produced an exhibition and a documentary about lesbian activists living in London during the 1980s. Flint mentions the Women In Revolt! exhibition, now in Edinburgh and heading to Manchester next year, which explored feminist art and activism in Britain from 1970 to 1990. “There have been these histories of incredible artists,” says Flint, “with legacies of political activism, that have been completely overlooked. But it feels like people are being recognised after such a long period.”

I wonder if she was able to identify many of the women in the photographs, the ones who, in the early 1980s, went off to a photography retreat in the Oregon wilderness to document their lives. “I don’t know who a lot of them are, unfortunately,” Flint says, adding that this is one of the difficulties with an artist who is no longer living. But she has heard that some of the women who lived in the community are excited about the project, and there is a note at the back of the book asking for more information.

“I’m hoping it will become an exercise in getting to know more about that history,” she says, “and that people maybe recognise themselves and write in.” Flint says that Corinne would get her models to sign release forms, which were worded to thank them for their contribution to the history of lesbian photography. “So I just think of that,” she says, “and I think of this as a continuation of what she was always anticipating.”

• Tee A Corinne: A Forest Fire Between Us is published by Mack on 30 June, £50