And Now for the Female Gaze

Photography has the power to make imagined realities tangible ones, helping us see even the most fantastical possibilities.

I experienced this miraculous phenomenon while first laying eyes on Lynne Morrison, Kailuum, Yucatán, Mexico by Cynthia MacAdams. I was working as a 2023 Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern with curator Paul Martineau and had the special opportunity to contribute research for his upcoming show Queer Lens: A History of Photography (on view June 17–September 28, 2025).

As we flipped through binders of artworks he had compiled, I was transported through what amounted to a vast photographic landscape of queer liberation across time. I remember feeling saddened by all the ways we have been limited in our expressions of love and self by persistent systems that still impose those limits. Yet many of the images—especially Lynne Morrison—made me feel hopeful that a future free of oppression and strict social constructions is possible.

In the image, Morrison rises from the Caribbean with her head back and chest open to the sky. Tightly framed against the horizon, her form seems unmovable and monumental, as if she were rooted in the sea floor and part of surrounding nature. The soft black-and-white composition further blurs the lines between human and natural forms, creating the sense that the woman is as vast and limitless as the water and sky.

When I see this and imagine what Morrison must have felt in that moment, I am transported into a different world, one far freer than anything I’ve ever conjured.

In another work, Theresa and Kim, Provincetown, MA, a display of sapphic affection is not objectified or sexualized for the male gaze. Instead, MacAdams’s modernist techniques focus on the beautiful connecting horizon between the two figures’ lips. The women’s forms evoke clouds colliding in the sky or slivers of stream between two great masses of land. The gender of the subjects becomes an afterthought when their magnetic connection is abstracted as a beautiful force of nature.

During my internship I returned again and again to MacAdams’s work for the sense of freedom it made me feel. And with the assistance of Paul, I was able to interview the artist about what drives her work.

MacAdams returned my call one afternoon from a lakeside retreat in South Dakota, where she was born. She walked me through the wonderful story of her career—it began with acting in Los Angeles, traveling across continents for spiritual awakenings, and exploring her artistic interest in photography in 1970s New York. After moving to the Bowery in Lower Manhattan, she published a revolutionary series of female portraits, Emergence (1977), wherein she beautifully highlighted the powerful and radical spirit of the women she photographed. She told me she was particularly attracted to women with a “F–you attitude,” and who used that energy to fight against the many inequalities that second-wave feminists concerned themselves with.

In 1983 MacAdams published another volume of work titled Rising Goddess (the series that includes Lynne Morrison and Theresa and Kim). This series arose from the revolutionary feminist politics she shared with many of the women she photographed before, namely Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics, the groundbreaking book published in 1970 that documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art.

During her Rising Goddess shoots, MacAdams told me, she managed to find a few safe places in nature to photograph friends in the nude. She was determined to make the work deeply collaborative and empathetic and to create brief spaces of freedom untouched by forces of patriarchy, colonization, and industrialization. But as she candidly explained to me, “Those spaces were just a fantasy, my darling.” Based on our current political and societal upheaval, the series seems just as fantastical 43 years later.

Not that the images can’t transport and reinvigorate us every time we look at them. Through her work, MacAdams fought against the patriarchal male gaze that had long dominated the medium and showed us a freer world we can fight for. With the work of more than 150 other makers, Queer Lens will not only invite visitors to recognize the societal constructions we must operate within but also inspire us to imagine the ways we can escape them.

After my phone call with MacAdams, Paul and I had the chance to visit her in Los Angeles, where she graciously showed us her own collection of beautiful prints. They document her lifetime of photographing powerful women and conjuring other worlds. Over Saint-André cheese and prosecco, we discussed our personal hopes for the future.

MacAdams hopes to continue showing her work and celebrating the monumental figures and places she photographed. I hope to continue celebrating the work of revolutionary figures like MacAdams and fighting for the future visionary people like her help us to imagine.