Sage Sohier

Sage Sohier

At Home With Themselves: Same-Sex Couples in 1980s America

October 1–November 2, 2014

Sage Sohier’s At Home with Themselves is a group of intimate portraits of committed same-sex couples made in the 1980s. Sohier produced images that stood in opposition to contemporaneous media portrayals of the “gay lifestyle,” images that expose some of the roots of today’s marriage equality movement.

In her recently published monograph of the series, Sohier writes, “Looking at these pictures now, I realize that it took a good deal more courage to stand up and be photographed as a same-sex couple in the 1980s than it does today, and I think the photographs somehow convey that. In some, there’s a tentativeness, in others a kind of not-to-be-taken-for-granted raw tenderness. People in my father’s generation had grown up feeling that being openly gay was just not an acceptable option. In my generation that began to change, and I was grateful to be witness to it."

Sage Sohier has been photographing people in their environments for more than 30 years. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University and has received fellowships from the No Strings Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. Sohier has had solo shows at Foley Gallery in New York, Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston, and The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Her work has also been included in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the International Center of Photography in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and many other venues. Sohier’s work is in the collections of the MoMA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others. Sohier’s series At Home With Themselves: Same-Sex Couples in 1980s America, will be released in October 2014 by Spotted Books. Other monographs include About Face, published in December of 2012 by Columbia College Chicago Press, and Perfectible Worlds, published by Photolucida in 2007. Sohier’s work is also on display this month at the Portland Art Museum as part of the retrospective exhibition Blue Sky: the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts at 40. This is Sohier’s fifth show at Blue Sky.