Whitney and Simone: A kiss from a best friend.
W HEN TSP SAW an image on photographer Allison Michael Orenstein’s website of a woman in a dress flexing her muscles, it spoke to a certain facet of the word sister for us. So we called the New York-based Orenstein to talk about sister politics in her photos—or so we thought.
Carrying our own stereotypes to the interview, we expected quite a different set of answers than the ones we got. Turns out the word “sister” is not an easy one for Allison, the younger sister to brothers who are five and seven years her senior. Nor is it a political statement for Orenstein at all.
“The word has a bad connotation because I was the annoying little sister who they didn’t want around,” she recalls. “It was like ‘Go away, get out of my room.’ ”
And then there was the homophobic presumption of sisterhood that Allison, a lesbian, encountered: how rather than tackle the truth, people would presume the woman you were with was your sister because that was the simplest explanation for exceptional closeness.
THE TSP INTERVIEW WITH ALLISON
A LLISON Michael Orenstein says her love of photography dates back to age 13, when she used her babysitting money to buy her first camera, an Olympus point-and-shoot. She earned her BFA (not relying on the Olympus) in photography at the University of Delaware, and headed to New York, where she is a professional photographer. We talked to her from the Brooklyn home she shares with her wife, Simone. (The couple was also captured in New York Magazine just as the TSP site went live.)
Q: You know you’re a sister when…
A. “You know you’re a sister when you’re black (or a nun).” (Allison is laughing now, in case you can’t hear that.) “A Jewish lesbian girl can’t really say that…
“But seriously, my mother has a great relationship with her sister; they’re really tight, and her sister’s the most important person in her life. Your kids grow up, she says, and your parents pass, but your sibling…”
Q. What does sister mean to you?
A. “A lesbian sisterhood definitely does exist, “ says Allison, but it’s not what the word sister conjures for her. “I feel the sister-brother relationship best, maybe, with some of my gay male friends, and like a sister to some of my closest female friends.”
An image of sisterhood?
Q. Will you share a best of/worst of experience with your siblings or your sister-friends?
A. “I have chosen family: a best friend and other very close female friend who are like sisters. I can talk to them about anything, go for coffee, go shopping, babysit their kids, go for pedicures, and just hang out.
“They’re like blood relatives because you love them so much and want to kill them at the same time—just like sisterhood. Sometimes it’s like, ‘Hey, get your shit together,’ which isn’t how you can talk to most people.”
Then there’s the other side: Before lesbianism was more mainstream, more spoken about, she says, “people would assume if you were traveling with a woman, staying in a hotel room, that you must be sisters. It was their explanation of why you’d be together.”
And there was a time when it was easier not to correct anyone, Allison admits. “ ‘Yeah, we’re sisters,’ was an easy explanation.”
A GALLERY OF ALLISON’S IMAGES
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