There are three ways to approach someone on Tinder after you’ve matched: Say some variation of “hey, how are you?”, send over a compliment based on an image, or ask them a question based off of the photos they’ve posted. It’s hard to start up a conversation with a stranger when you’ve got no context. There isn’t much time to get someone’s attention.
In 2011, long before Tinder was invented — remember those days? The good old days of meeting people IRL! — I was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, covering the sprawling ArtPrize art fair for Hyperallergic. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing there, but the Megabus from Chicago to Grand Rapids was really cheap, I was looking for an adventure, and there was a free hotel room at my disposal. For those who don’t know, ArtPrize is this bizarre art competition located in a very religious county in Michigan. I arrived excited, but soon felt lost amongst the Jesus sculptures and blonde-hair, blue-eyed white women.
Luckily, a friend of mine in Chicago introduced me ahead of time to the artist Anna Campbell, who was teaching at nearby Grand Valley State University [https://www.gvsu.edu/]. She would be around for ArtPrize. I was working primarily as an art journalist at the time, so I figured I would interview her for an article I was writing about the politics of ArtPrize, which broke down as a bizarre, politically problematic coming together of populism and art world elitism funded with corporate cash from the ultra-conservative DeVos family.
Anna and I met for a drink at Diversions Video Bar, one of the few gay bars in town. It reminded me of a scene from Small Town Gay Bar, a documentary that explores the communities that sprung up at two gay bars in rural Mississippi. This was the Midwest, but it all felt eerily familiar — the hole-in-the-wall ambiance, the evading eye contact, the Pacman machine that had been there since 1995. That week, Diversions was also a venue for ArtPrize, which meant that various abstract paintings hung on the walls.
Even though we were surrounded on all sides by bad art in this strange city of Republicans and Christians, and more Jesus representations than I’d ever encountered outside of a church, Anna and I carved out our own space that evening. I was there trying to be objective about the fair but I knew that was pretty much impossible. I wondered if I was too opinionated to really be a journalist. As our fun conversation wound down, we grabbed our tab and cashed out. Anna dropped me back at the hotel. She told me she would be in Brooklyn that summer; thank Jesus H. that she’d get out of Grand Rapids.
In 2014, I got a Facebook message from Anna. She wanted to know if I’d like to see a catalogue she’d recently published. It was called Ever Your Friend, she told me. I didn’t ask too many more questions about it; I said sure, and she dropped it in the mail. I love receiving letters and packages via post, rarely will I say no to a package.
When it arrived the following week, I flipped through casually and then put it on a pile of other catalogues and art books I’d received. I wasn’t sure there was anything I could write about it, and then I forgot about it until a few weeks later, when I received a message from a Tinder match that reminded me of something Anna had said.
I had decided to swipe right on this girl because her name was unusual, and she was pretty cute. I sent a semi-generic message asking about something visual in her profile — this little Pacman crawler type thing, what was that? She replied that same day, telling me that she took this photo with it in England, but there were plenty of these little ghost-y creatures around LA —did I not see them? Then she asked me how I was, and told me that she liked my hands.
I wrote back mostly addressing the Pacman crawler things, saying that I hadn’t seen them around here — I mostly encountered graffiti with the tag WEED WOLF, but maybe I don’t get out enough. Our conversation dropped off like most of them do. It is a “chat” minus the “chit” which would have turned it into an ongoing “chit-chat.”
A few days later I found myself re-arranging my room when I came across Anna Campbell’s book. I decided to flip through and realized that this was the project she’d mentioned to me that time a few years ago, when she said she was headed to Brooklyn for the summer.
Ever Your Friend began in summer 2011 during a one-month research trip to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, but it took years to realize it — three, in fact. For the project, Campbell explored photos from the Archives, which contains a huge collection of materials by and about lesbians (the site says this, not queer women) and their communities. Many of the materials are anonymous.
What’s more interesting here is that most of the images in the Archives’ photo collection, as Campbell writes in the catalogue, “have largely not been seen outside of the Archives, as a process for securing the permissions for publication was not in place at the time the photo collection was established.” Perhaps this was for the best — the images were protected, and the lesbian community kept it in the family.
For Campbell’s delicate book project, she focused in on smaller areas of exposure in the photographs, which allowed them to be reproduced. She looked at the tiny gestures between women, noting in particular “the significance of the lesbian hand as an instrument of sexual pleasure.”
Flipping through the pages, I spotted hands in various types of poses: one delicate finger hanging, hands poised as if kneading, holding, pointing, and then hands holding glasses of wine, guns, cigarettes, batons and magic hats. One cannot see the person, their face, lips, or nose. It’s only the hands that matter, floating as if in mid-air, on a page, suspended without context.
Images from Ever Your Friend by Anna Campbell.
Crystal Paradise is a weekly column published every Tuesday by Los Angeles-based writer Alicia Eler that navigates the naturally occurring weirdnesses that spark at the intersection of art, technology and travel.
