The Tamesis
Since ancient times, the meaning of dikes has undergone many twists and turns. L wordthankfully it does. In a new monograph, photographer Emily Lipson has collected images taken over a five-year period of 50 different people considered to be members of the dyke community, including Evie Saunders, Ama Elsesser and Louisa Jacobson. The result is a joyful and natural celebration of the term’s many meanings and manifestations.
This week, Fashion Chatted with Lipson about queer longing, self-awareness, and drawing inspiration from ballet. Read this conversation and check out exclusive images from her book, aptly titled dike-the following.
Fashion: Where does the spark come from? dike Light it up for you first?
Emily Lipson: To be honest, it was more of a slow realization than a spark. I realized that the images I put the most effort into making, the ones that felt alive to me, all revolved around the same people, the same energy, the same negotiations around gender, intimacy, representation, belonging.
For my first book, I knew I couldn’t commit to a single aesthetic—I shot digital, I shot film, I used artificial intelligence, I made collages by hand, I printed and used dyes. There are many different and conflicting approaches to photographic aesthetics in my work, and it’s all smashed together in this book. Sometimes it gives me an existential fear that I’m not establishing myself as an artist enough. But it occurred to me that I needed to work on subject matter, not aesthetics, so the choice of my first book was easy because it was the most personal to me, but also very open-ended.
I want to make one thing clear: this book is not about defining a community. It’s about resisting simplification. As an artist, I can’t create one way, and dykes shouldn’t look one way; it’s all saying the same thing.
The talent lineup is dike It’s incredible. How do you assemble such a diverse and cool lineup?
It is not so much assembled as it is accumulated. These are the people I’ve met throughout my life, friends, collaborators, exes, people I’ve danced with, people I’ve worked with, people I’ve disagreed with. The project developed through trust and time, not casting. I’m interested in photographing a community that is unified not by taste, politics or even mutual affection, but by a shared recognition of self. Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about the queer experience. Queer fantasies can live deep within us and are sometimes even better than the real thing. A lot of the queer experience is living in that longing, sitting in that awkwardness. I wanted to play with that in the book – there’s a lot of face-to-face imagery and then hints. What interests me is the discomfort of wanting to see more or not getting enough of something.
