CHAPTER 1 - THE ARCHIVE

If a photograph is explained, fleshed out beyond its rectangular peripheries, given depth of field, does it become more powerful, or does its poignancy and its romance fade with minor detail, thousands of little lights cast into the distance, distracting from its acuity?

Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) is one of the most celebrated experimental lesbian filmmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries, known for films like Dyketactics, Nitrate Kisses, and A Horse Is Not a Metaphor. 

But in the Summer of 1973, Hammer was just beginning to find her voice as an artist and a filmmaker. Her life was in flux: her mother had just died, her first relationship with a woman was ending, and she was debating her place in the lesbian-feminist movement that was raging and rapidly changing shape around her. 

Along the way, Hammer found her way to Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich – a remote island off the Pacific coast of Canada. Over the course of the next two days, she took dozens of photographs depicting three women at play and in love along the island's shorelines, in its forests and meadows.

Barbara Hammer's photographs from Hornby Island have since been widely exhibited around the world. When I first encountered them, I had a personal reaction, immediately recognising the rocks, grasses and beaches contained in their frames. I wondered: Why did Barbara Hammer travel to Hornby Island? Who brought her there? Is she the key to an untold queer history of the island? And most importantly, who's the unknown 'new friend' in so many of her photos on Hornby Island? 

New Friend is a five-part radio documentary exploring the story behind a series of photographs taken by the artist and experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer over one weekend in August 1973, on Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, in the Salish Sea.

Thank you to all of those who shared their stories, memories, and voices for the purposes of this project.

In this chapter, you heard the following voices (in order of appearance):

• Barbara Hammer
• Florrie Burke
• Claire Cronia
• Judith Lawrence
• Scott Watson
• Nym Hughes
• Andrew Durbin
• Rosemary Allenbach
• Martha Ross
• Derek Anderson
• Elaine Savoie
• The rocks, plants, trees, wind, and water of Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich.
• Martha Ross voices the diary of Barbara Hammer and correspondences of Barbara Hammer and Terry Anderson.
• You also hear excerpts from Barbara Hammer’s films X (1974), Double Strength (1978), and Tender Fictions (1996). You also hear excerpts from interviews with Barbara Hammer by Jeu de Palme, The Seventh Art, and Berkeley Art + Design.

Credits:

• Hosted by Bitsy Knox.
• Production, research, script and sound design by Bitsy Knox.
• Mixing and mastering by Robert Steenkamer. 
• New Friend was originally aired on Cashmere Radio Berlin and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.
• Cover image courtesy of The Estate of Barbara Hammer.
• New Friend is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Thank you to:

• The Estate of Barbara Hammer
• Hornby Island Community Archives
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
• Cashmere Radio, Berlin
• 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio
• KOW, Berlin
• Company Gallery, New York City
• Florrie Burke
• Louky Keijsers Koning 
• Martha Ross
• Derek Anderson
• Rebecca Dunne
• Emma Walter
• Emily Harrison
• All beings, human and more-than-human, of Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, and its surrounding waters—where I am a part-time, uninvited guest on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral land of the K'omoks First Nation, the Eitsen, Pentlach, Sasitla and Sahtloot peoples.

Go here to learn more about the work of Barbara Hammer, including upcoming screenings and events.

Bitsy Knox is an artist, editor, radio producer and writer. She grew up on the unceded and ancestral territory of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. She is based in Berlin, Germany. Follow her on Instagram here.

For more information, and to support independent community radio, visit Cashmere Radio and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_05 0:00

In the 70s, I always carried like a little mic on, or besides my phone camera, I would carry a canon or a night on with me. And I took photos as I wished. And this was in Hornby Island in up in British Columbia. So you know I see when I go back to that, I see sort of like a vanilla man golden.

SPEAKER_04 0:27

Anytime Barbara was out in nature, she was happy. And if she could combine it with uh her filming or photography, then she was really happy.

SPEAKER_13 0:38

This has got to be Hornby Island. Exactly. You gotta looking like Hornby. How much kissing's been done on these beaches? Let me tell you. A lot. We know where all the caves are, my waterfall, and I'm gonna get our teeth. We know all the best places.

SPEAKER_06 1:06

I don't think everybody was running around naked on Hornby in those days. Certainly there weren't people running around running around on the beach playing. At least not that I was aware of.

SPEAKER_10 1:23

You don't you never know everything that's going on. And I've heard stories and um her Amazon friends and how wild they were, and some of the people who would come and like on motorbikes and stuff like that, or tearing around on boats and stuff like that, bare breasted.

SPEAKER_09 1:42

So the photographs don't show the the women getting beaten up when they come out of the the lesbian bar at 2 a.m. You know, I mean, and they don't show the courtroom scenes where the kids are getting taken away, and they don't show pick people getting fired, and they don't sh- I mean they just don't show the more difficult aspects. And what they don't show is yeah, it was it was hot and we were all sleeping with each other and naked and but we didn't have the skills to deal with it. We were young, really young. Most of us were really fucked up from our childhoods, and a lot of us had had been very hurt as teenagers and young women.

SPEAKER_08 2:27

And we talked about Hornby Island a little bit. The women on that island, though. You know, what Barbara would talk to me a lot about was the women who have disappeared and who are gone, um, who are in these photographs and what they did, the architects, the people who helped her. So she talked a lot about these women who led these profoundly interesting, active lives as people in the world who were creating a world also, and how they could just be so easily wiped off the face of the planet. And so for her, we talked a lot about the project, not necessarily in the individual details, but as a kind of resurrection of this of this world, that much of it had been lost in different ways, and that she was sort of surprised to be a almost a survivor of, as much as she was a survivor.

SPEAKER_12 3:32

Chapter one, the archive. Once an image is given form beyond the pinhole view it reveals, is it more whole? If a photograph's context is explained, fleshed out beyond its rectangular peripheries, does it become more powerful? Or does its poignancy and romance fade with minor detail? Thousands of little lights cast into the distance, distracting from its acuity. Sure. Photographs tell stories. But what do those stories tell us? And how do they warble and warp the more they are told? I don't remember when I first learned about Barbara Hammer, the experimental filmmaker and pioneer of lesbian cinema. Was it in a feminist art history class at art school? Or maybe it was when I saw a still from her 1977 film Multiple Orgasm gracing the cover of the art magazine I was working for at the time. That was in 2018, arguably the culmination of a watershed year in her artistic career the year prior. It was also almost exactly a year before Barbara Hammer succumbed to a 13-year battle with ovarian cancer. After years of working and dedication to experimental film, the international art world was beginning to pay attention to Barbara's work not just as a filmmaker, but as an artist. In 2017, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art hosted her retrospective evidentiary bodies. In the years prior, she had begun to work with commercial galleries, KOW in Berlin and soon after, Company in New York City. Those galleries began to dive into her dense archives, and in doing so uncovered a wealth of writings, memorabilia, drawings and paintings, and photography that would shed new light not only on Barbara's filmography, by then nearly 100 films deep, but on the times she lived through, from a middle-class upbringing in Los Angeles to her transition from sorority sister to wife, traveling around the world on a motorcycle with her then husband and eventually homesteading in Northern California, and then starting in 1970, to the seminal early moments of identifying as a lesbian, buying a motorcycle of her own, and traveling around Europe and Africa on it with her first girlfriend, studying film at San Francisco State University, and becoming involved in the women's and gay liberation movements. In just a few years, between 1972 and 1975, Barbara Hammer would make a slew of experimental films, including Dyke Tactics, often spoke about as the first film to openly explore lesbian sexuality. That same year, in 2017, Barbara Hammer's film and video archive was obtained for distribution by Electric Arts Intermix, and ten of her early films were being preserved by the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation. Crucially, Barbara's vast archive of writings, letters, memorabilia, sound recordings, and diaries that she had carried from apartment to apartment and city to city for nearly fifty years were being sold to Yale University's Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, not only sitting alongside the archives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, but also made public for the first time.

SPEAKER_05 8:42

Walter Benjamin told us everything is important. A matchstick, a sink, a piece of clothing, a superdyke t-shirt, anything that we've used in our work should be preserved and kept, and a whole culture can be understood from that.

SPEAKER_12 9:01

From those archives, dozens of rolls of film, about 1,000 photographs in all, were unearthed with the help of Barbara's Gallery Company. Andrew Durbin, now the editor in chief of Freeze magazine, but at the time a director at Company and a close friend of Barbara's, helped her go through the photographs, giving them dates, places, and titles as best they could. Titles like Kissing, Hornby Island, 1972, New Friend and Terry, Hornby Island, 1975, Friends, Northern California Coast, 1973, and Self-Portrait, Baja, 1974. Together, they conceived of an exhibition at Company with an accompanying publication by Capricious that would exhibit just 29 of these photographs. Photos of lovers, friends, motorcycle trips, film productions, and landscapes. All documents of becoming. Some fifteen of these photos, including improbably maybe all of the ones I just mentioned, were shot on Hornby Island.

SPEAKER_08 10:41

There would be box in box of like diaries and sculpture and photographs and collages, etc. And so we started to go through it in a very basic way. And it was very clear to me from the beginning that this is a huge amount of material that needed organization and curation, and that we were not going to get anywhere fast. Um and what I thought was, and what I pitched to Barbara, I said, Well, this is what company can do. Since we can't really do a proper film program for you in general, what we can do is take your career part by part and tell a different story about each decade of your life. And I said to Barbara, well, why didn't it say the 70s or for the next show we do the 70s photos? And Barbara said none of those are none. We could never show them. Wasn't that Barbara was embarrassed by these photographs? It was that they just didn't capture her imagination because she was so interested in what she was doing now. So we started looking through the negatives and the contact sheets, and I said, Well, why don't you let me just go through them and organize them and digitize them? And then just let me make a selection. Okay, okay, okay. I think I went from a thousand photos to five to seven hundred fifty, five hundred, down, down, down, down, down. And by the time we got to about 300 or so, Sophie and I realized we really had a show which would become truant. And we really then started to create a narrative.

SPEAKER_12 12:19

That narrative that Andrew and his gallery partner, Sophie Mona, created was of the exploration of women's bodies in relation.

SPEAKER_04 12:29

Um, I mean, it was always wonderful for her to be surrounded by female energy and women and women's bodies and uh the diversity in women's bodies.

SPEAKER_12 12:43

As Flori Burke, Barbara's wife, explains her fascination with women's bodies, friendships, and sexuality brought Barbara to a lifelong fascination with touch and with the construction of oneself. In the press release for Truend at Company Gallery, the photographs were described like this.

SPEAKER_11 13:10

Hammer's gladoscopic vision continuously upended representational expectations about the female body and the expression of sexual and romantic desire, as well as the formation of self on screen. Many of the photographs included in Truant relate directly to Hammer's better known work as a filmmaker. Others are considerably more spontaneous and personal, even diaristic. There are moments of sex and nudity, two crucial subjects that she has investigated in film, photography, sculpture, and performance throughout her career. Bodies cavort beside a river, in fields and in museums. Women look at art. There are landscapes and animals. Known women, the feminist artist and writer T. Corinne, for one, makes numerous appearances across the decade. Lesser known women, too.

SPEAKER_12 14:18

Lesser known women. I had just been vaguely aware of Barbara Hammer's work beyond filmmaking when, on a late night internet search, I stumbled upon this iconic series of black and white photos. At first, actually, just one of them. It was Barbara and another woman, naked and crawling and scraping their way out of a rock formation, laughter and faux anguish pouring across their faces. The photo is called Aphrodite's Birth, Hornby Island, dated 1972. I recognized that rock formation they were playing on. I played on it myself as a child when my family would visit Hornby in the summer months as tourists. Hornby Island, or by its traditional Ayajutham name, Jada, sits approximately in the middle of a vast archipelago in the Salish Sea, set between two bodies of land commonly known as Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, and at a traditional meeting point between the Kwakwakiwak people to the north and Coast Salish people to the south. To the east of Hornby is Texeda, or Siyuyin Island, located on the traditional territory of the Tlaamun, Shishok, Komox, and Wewakum nations, and Leskiti, or Huaitai Island, part of Kualakum, Halald, Tlaamun, and Snunamok territory. And to Hornby's west is Denman Island, or Sladaich, and a bit north, Courtney Comox, all of which, along with Hornby Island Jadaich, form part of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Comox First Nation. When Spanish ships arrived in the area in 1791, they named the island Isla de Lorena. And in 1850, when officers from the Hudson Bay Company surveyed the area, they named the island Hornby. European settlers arrived in the region in the 1860s, and with them the second smallpox epidemic of 1862, which killed an estimated 50% of Comox and 90% of Pentlatch people. Since then, the island has been associated with whaling and fishing, logging, then agriculture, and by the mid-20th century, artists, hippies, back to the landers, and tourists. I wasn't in New York City in 2017 to see the Druant exhibition, and I never met Barbara Hammer. But I recognized the rocks and the grass and the sky in those photographs. And maybe I recognized something else in them too. 2017 was also a big year for me, a tumultuous one. It took me about a year to realize that what I was going through was called a burnout. And so in 2019, I left Berlin for a while and headed back to coastal BC, where I grew up. In particular, I went to Hornby Island, where by now my parents were living part-time in the process. I fell in love with a woman for the first time, a Californian at that. It didn't last long, but it changed everything. I was thirty-four, about the same age as Barbara Hammer when she took those photographs on Hornby Island. And so I began to ask, who are the women in these photos with Barbara? And what was Barbara Hammer's relationship to Hornby Island? One photo entitled New Friend and Terry, dated 1975, shows two white women on a sunny, windswept day leaning into each other as they direct their gaze deep into Barbara's lens. The energy is palpable. But who is Terry? And who is new friend? What might she tell us about the lesbian and queer history of Hornby Island? And did Barbara Hammer contribute something to that history? So I set to work finding out. I started by visiting Hornby Island's archives, and then Judith Lawrence at her longtime residence on Hornby Island. I know of Judith, like most Canadians who grew up in the 90s, as the puppeteer and voice of Casey and Finnegan on the beloved Canadian children's TV show Mr. Dress Up. But Judith has led an extraordinary life beyond children's television. She has been a dedicated peace activist, starting The Voice of Women, an editor of the seminal feminist newspaper Broadside. She's also a lesbian who, along with friends from Toronto, were perhaps some of the first openly gay women on the island arriving in the late 1960s. Which is the same. That's that's Barbara Hammer, the filmmaker. And that's I think the same person. Who is it? I don't know. That's the mystery. This person? It's this person here, I believe, with the brain. That's that was Barbara Hammer's um girlfriend at the time. A woman by the name of Terry Syngraf, who was a core member for Dancer. No idea who that is. No one clue. Because from everything that I can find, she she was the kind of reason that they found themselves here. I should stop right there. You see, when I started researching this project, the only Terry I could identify at first from Barbara's life was the San Francisco-based dancer and choreographer, Terry Sengraaff, the innovator of an aerial dance form called Motivity, and a one-time girlfriend of Barbara's. They made a film together in 1978 called Double Strength.

SPEAKER_05 21:48

I remember something there's some way that I connect with you that is not intellectual, but is emotional. In a money wise. is very satisfying to me. And when you were had your head between my breasts this morning and when you were sucking on my breast, I just I was it was just thrilling.

SPEAKER_12 22:15

I just had very, very, very deep rushings going through and a suffice it to say, I had it all wrong. But first, I needed to go to the Beineke Rare Books Library at Yale University to figure all of that out. In my head, a line from Trinity Minha via Barbara Hammer's 1996 autobiographical film Tender Fictions displayed in my head.

SPEAKER_05 22:50

Each story is at once a fragment and a whole a hole within a hole. The same story has always been changing. Things which do not shift and grow cannot continue to circulate.

SPEAKER_12 23:03

Trinity Min Hall is each position a story is told from introduces a new morality, a new drive, a new hero. And so in search of gravity, you might turn to the archive. And from the archive you may pull out writings once held close to a single heart. The writings may reveal the underpinnings of affect. They may indulge in poetry in diatribes in careful meditations in unfinished shorthands fiercely and distractedly alike. You may think that you are coming to know the writer through their archives, what they've been through, through the letters and diary entries they send and receive, even when archives hide as much as they reveal, and what they omit is just as important as what they hold on to. And through those letters and through those diaries and pictures you may piece together a chronology, a trajectory that will ultimately lead to a grand image of a single time and place. I wasn't entirely sure what time period exactly I should be searching for when I first arrived at the Beineke that November. The Hornby Island photos in the Truant show had been dated between 1972 and 1975. I began to imagine that Barbara had made many trips to the island I began to read through Barbara's diaries, her autobiographical novel from the same time and letter after letter and I soon realized that no Barbara couldn't have been on Hornby Island in 1972. She was teaching English in Germany then with her first girlfriend Marie A. Shaw it wasn't until I got to her diary from 1973 that things started to crystallize.

SPEAKER_02 25:43

Suddenly a summer of love and a thousand mile journey began to unfold we were back from the raging convention would you drive a thousand miles for a week of love in August 1973 and just that one time for a weekend things were beginning to crystallize.

SPEAKER_12 26:12

Amongst her letters I found a stack of several neatly packed postcards notes and long very long letters mostly on yellow legal pad page after page to Barbara from Terry.

SPEAKER_02 26:29

Keeping in touch design I will come wherever you the final at the first following empty space between the decision collapse new situations came you. Back from Hornby with shaking hands.

SPEAKER_12 26:49

Terry and Barbara's love affair began to unfold all around me across hundreds of pages of notes and letters and diary entries in the most poignant the most tender sometimes the most furious of details according to what I was reading Terry was studying at the time at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and she had two kids Derek and Valerie. The biographical details just weren't adding up with what I knew of Terry Sengraff, but I went with them for the time being and set out looking for the new friend. Equipped with new knowledge I continued to comb the archives for signs of new friend. And then finally in a box of miscellaneous writings I found a tiny spiral bound notebook with a panda eating bamboo on the cover. At the back of that notebook I found two addresses Martha Ross of Burnaby BC and Rosemary Allenbach General Delivery General Delivery I'd found them you see on Hornby if you don't have a P.O. box you have your mail sent to General Delivery at the post office in the co-op store it didn't take me long to find Martha and Rosemary after that. As it turns out Martha lives in Toronto and she works in theater and Rosemary lives in Vancouver. She was a producer for many years at CBC Radio. Fifty years later they're still close friends. Give me a tibet then I can make I mean she was definitely she was there because of us I mean you know that's why I had no idea no I don't know anything about this we're hitchhiking they picked us up and we said come oh really so you hitch you were hitchhiking on the onto the island yeah either to Denman Martha has family has a cabin there so she is hi Martha oh my goodness hi Betsy hi Martha um I'm gonna open up so here wait so we'll start here this is can you see my screen there it is so this is how I found you guys incredible that's incredible that's where I grew up in Burnaby that's your house and Rosemary was there a time that you were living on Hornby with this address general delivery I had no address so she just put that down but good old archivist Barbara Hammer. As soon as I saw Martha on the zoom screen I knew that she was new friend she looks just like the photographs in 1973. But Martha and her lifelong friend Rosemary, who is also present in many of the photos from that weekend aren't some sort of magic key to the secret world of Hornby Island's lesbian history as I thought or maybe hoped.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

As it turns out neither of them ever lived full time on the island neither of them are lesbians either another thing I soon found out is that they had no idea that these photos had ever been shown publicly to anyone anywhere well I I'm kind of I mean Barbara didn't contact us so I that's my first thought is Barbara that's kind of outrageous but um they're beautiful photographs and um uh so you know I mean I look at them and I think about how I had obviously no inhibitions.

SPEAKER_03 30:58

Um I mean the people who who the photographs were of they own the work too and so uh that one of you lying on your back is just an incredible it's about the amazing positivity and energy and how you're a reflection of an incredible upbringing and a family that made you the person you are and that's what that photograph is about it's about Martha Ross the incredible person. So you own that photograph I mean Barbara Hammer took it and she has her interpretation but you do too because it's actually you right on your back is it's a masterpiece I'd say what do you think Martha I think so too it's beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 31:47

Yeah don't you think it's kind of funny though that it's put in a show that has a kind of a theme mandate and it's not right it is really funny like I don't even know how to process that like don't you find it a little bit astounding if she didn't try to get hold of us I mean not but that it says a lot about Barbara.

SPEAKER_12 32:07

As Martha and Rosemary reminisced with me about that fateful weekend with Barbara and Terry fleshing out these little details I had read about in the archive and expanding way beyond them it became clear to me that Martha and Rosemary are also the only living witnesses to the making of these photographs. And as they spoke they began to paint a picture of Barbara and Terry at that particular moment in their lives a moment of immense flux for both of them.

SPEAKER_08 32:41

When it came to Barbara they described someone who was larger than life charismatic energetic decisive intuitive somehow we connected with them and they found out that we were going to this beautiful island and convinced us that they should come with us and so the thing that Rose and I have talked about is how in retrospect just how convincing Barbara was like she was a force of nature like there were you couldn't really say no to Barbara like it's not like we I don't remember being intimidated by her but if she had an idea you did it like it was she just had a commanding presence and so uh she was the first uh film artist I had ever met is that true certainly the first female film artist I'd ever met and the first lesbian that so kind of you know extraordinary when you think of it like I I knew someone else who eventually became a lesbian but she was the first lesbian who was proud and uh of the fact and uh proclaiming it from the mountaintops like she really embraced this sexuality yeah Barbara was the sexiest person who probably walked this earth to be honest with you up until her very last minute I mean Barbara was had swagger she had she looked at you she she desired I mean she she wanted things out of the world she didn't want things out of you but she wanted you she wanted some part of you she was drinking you up she was such a she was so thrilled by life and so Barbara desire animated everything it animates the work it animates and and desire that you know sex of course but also just this this this intense feeling of life was so part of her and I thought Barbara I don't know it's like what I experienced when I first met her I see her at that light industry screening I thought oh my God this person is beautiful I mean just such an interesting you know it was just you could you could feel it just penetrating you from from across the room the these rays of Barbara and that was true I think I think that must I mean obviously I didn't know her in the 50s 60s onward but that must have been true then because you see those photographs of how those women are looking at her and it's like you know you get it like you know it leaves nothing to to the imagination in that regard.

SPEAKER_04 35:44

You know the way she would explain her work to me was I just make it and whatever comes to my mind I just do it. So she rather than saying okay I'm gonna take my camera here and I'm gonna get some women here and do this it was more just what evolved from that combination of being in nature and the same thing when she made her early films when she would go take a bunch of women up to and just play in the woods.

SPEAKER_12 36:16

Barbara's life and work have been large for many years now there are countless interviews articles and essays about her work.

SPEAKER_04 36:26

There are books like her 2009 autobiography and of course there are her films many of which draw from her own life and experiences and all of their extraordinary sometimes contradictory detail but who was Terry and who was Terry in 1973 there were always women there were always affairs I couldn't keep them all straight she probably couldn't either but um uh you know she did mention going to Hornby of course and um talked about the wonderful experience that she had there but not really zeroing in on Terry Anderson.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

She she was lovely and kind and but just very very gentle like just um it it did seem like she like she probably came out because of Barbara that was sort of the sense in retrospect I think this could have been her first affair but that she was in awe of Barbara.

SPEAKER_03 37:38

And also the feeling was that well she did have children but where were they? She had been divorced and I suppose I got a feeling of her being unhappy I suppose like with Barbara Hammer she it was quite clear that she was leading her life but with Terry you know I don't know exactly what was going on there. I suppose the fact that I don't remember that much about her means that Barbara was the dominant person.

SPEAKER_02 38:05

So yeah. Yeah there was a great there was a profound sadness about Terry. Um we kind of had the sense that she left her husband not long before did you get that feeling Rose?

SPEAKER_08 38:21

That it was recent is that more it was more recent actually there was turmoil coming off her I felt so Barbara didn't I don't remember Barbara talking to me about Terry to be honest with you.

SPEAKER_12 38:33

I mean she was obviously interested in intentional communities and she was interested in women who were living collectively in one way or another um and part of her travels were determined by that I mean she was going places because she knew either she had met someone or she had a connection some way to some group of women who were doing something but so much of it was about the present you know what I mean like the women we talked about were quirky um T That conversation with Andrew Durbin was in November 2023 just a week later I received a copy of Terry Sengraf's memoir it was there and then that I realized once and for all that I had been looking for the wrong Terry all along I went back to my research Terry Anderson two children Derek and Valerie a first husband named Dwight California to British Columbia I googled and I googled until at last so can you see my screen now that's mom that's your mom and that looks like Hornby okay um my name is Derek Dwight Anderson I live in Sasuke California I've been a history teacher um all of my career and for the majority of it a librarian as well Derek is also an author of history books about people who improbably changed the course of history and as it turned out that's how I was able to find him I started to look at the details of their relationship and I was I basically come to came to the realization that in fact this was not the same. And um and so um and also you know it was some kind of cognitive dissonance where uh they looked the two Terries looked similar enough that I kind of suspended disbelief but the more I looked at the photographs the more I thought no this is impossible because isn't that a fascinating moment?

SPEAKER_01 40:43

Like I just like you you you you're researching and you're based on a certain number of assumptions right and and you get your mind frame and you're all set and then oh wait this this moment and all I just love that that is so I think it's the most powerful intellectual moments in a in a career is when you sort of readjust and and reass reassess. I it's happened to me a couple of times and I've loved it every time like wow this is this is it's a little bit like you know if you fall in love and all of a sudden the world looks different.

SPEAKER_12 41:15

You know it's a it's a and suddenly it was like oh my god of course this is not the same person. Um so then through as I was looking for I knew that um that Terry had had the name Anderson um and and I knew that your father's name was Dwight through the correspondence and I knew that she had two children Derek and Valerie I think the the way that I eventually came to you was that I typed in Derek Valerie Dwight Anderson as a like completely random thing just to see if I put all the names in what would happen. And I came up on I think probably it was your sister's book review of your book and I thought well that seems likely that this might be the same person. And then when I saw your your author portrait uh on your website I immediately noticed the resemblance and I thought this might be with Derek we began to piece together the story of Barbara and Terry's relationship and how it was that they arrived in British Columbia at all.

SPEAKER_01 42:30

So let me let me tell you about how we got to Vancouver and why this meeting occurred okay mom she'd been offered a a fellowship at Stanford um but she turned it down to go to Vancouver uh where she had to self-finance a uh program in cinematography, film um and something else at the University of British Columbia you know she'd been offered a PhD position um with a fellowship at Stanford in English but I think she was interested in um expressing some of the this other creativity and so it makes total sense to me that um you know Terry and Barbara found this connection through film uh through photography through the arts and ultimately what happened was we just couldn't afford it financially.

SPEAKER_12 43:26

Just like Martha and Rosemary, this was the first time that Derek had seen these photographs of his mother and they brought back visceral memories. So here they are on the beach at Hornby Okay and um here is Barbara on the left and then Martha in the middle and then Barbara oh my god okay yes I know her yeah yeah okay

SPEAKER_01 44:00

No, I mean, you you can't I can't tell you how much this is bringing back. Like, this is this is so cool.

SPEAKER_12 44:07

Just like Martha and Rosemary, Derek also ruminated on what it is to find out that photos of his mother he had never seen before had already been exhibited and published widely.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

They're just abstract women in a certain way, right? I mean, that you they're not people, they're um they're just unknown autonomous um women. And so you're what you're celebrating, or what you're looking at, is the form and the their beauty. You don't know them. Of course, it's different when you know the the person, and then you're kind of you see it in a different way. But I it doesn't bother me at all. That in fact I'm kind of honored that um you know the the the photo's there and makes me want to go to the Whitney, you know, and and see it. But um any photograph isn't a there's a level of abstraction until until you know more of the context, and then of course you you see it differently. Something like Dorothea Lang's uh you know famous photo of the woman with the baby on her lap and the little girl on her lap and the depression, and you know, this would become this iconic photograph to describe the depression and pain and misery and poverty and everything else. That that photo is moved from an abstraction to having a personality because it's so iconic. But if we knew if we knew who that woman was, if that was our aunt or our mother or grandmother or something, we would see it totally differently, right? Um, and that that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_12 45:47

There was one thing that Derek and I couldn't figure out and still don't precisely know, which is how Barbara and Terry met in the summer of 1973. Barbara was living in Berkeley, California, traveling around the state in her motorcycle, visiting friends and festivals and conferences but what about Terry?

SPEAKER_01 46:13

So I, you know, the the San Francisco period, um mom had an enormous number of friends, and th those friendships are always very intense. She was a very intense person uh in many ways, and my father was too. And I think it was that intensity that drew them together. Um and so she she liked being around powerful people, and I don't mean that politically powerful or economically powerful. She liked being around people who she could who had strong personalities, who could um challenge who could challenge her, and who she could intellectually debate with and and fight with, you know. Um and so and part of that came out of that, you know, who she was at the University of Montana as the the star, you know. Uh and then part of it was um the free speech movement and uh uh all of that radicalism in in Berkeley in the you know 64, 65, 66, um and then in a connection with San Francisco.

SPEAKER_12 47:36

1973 was an important year for both Barbara and Terry. For Terry, it meant the end of a marriage and moving her and her children to a new country in search of a new life and a new kind of education. For Barbara, it marked the year her mother died and the end of her first relationship with a woman. But most of all, it meant film. In 1973, Barbara was in her final year of film studies at San Francisco State University. That year, she made a number of some of her most iconic early work, including Sisters, filmed at the second national lesbian conference at UCLA, in which both Barbara's friend and mentor, the feminist theorist Kate Millette, and the poet, philosopher, and activist Audrey Lord spoke. She would also make two films that would become part of her psychosynthesis trilogy: I Once I Am, an X.

SPEAKER_05 48:44

In fact, Barbara filmed X the same day as her first date with Terry. 1973, nine-minute 16 millimeter, rarely seen, but discovered recently by my calorist in Berlin and then school to the Polish Museum. I'm lucky that I'm eliminated in a performative critique has come out to embrace the world. And that there's hunger for celebration. There is hunger in the queer community for finding a joyous time, the period that is in the past, when we think we could change the world and we were all coming out at the same time, because now the struggle has been defined as difficult, long-lasting. And I think going back to that period of optimism and desire being satisfied right away, which I think is in my film to the 70s, is um nurturing to the folks that are looking at it, the younger folks that are looking at it. The old ones are getting nostalgic, you know. And you know, so there's a critique of nostalgia, but I don't know, it's not not all bad, right? If it's memory and you know, remembering a good time.

SPEAKER_12 50:09

What was becoming clear to me in diving deeply into the hundreds of pages of Barbara's diaries and Terry's letters to Barbara was that these two women, and maybe also Hornby Island to a certain extent, had a profound impact on each other's lives and work, however short-lived their relationship. As I read their letters and diary entries over and over again, a world emerged of two women, reaching two countries and a 1,000-mile distance, both coming to terms with who they were and who they wanted to be, and who they couldn't help being. Barbara and Terry were beginning to understand themselves in 1973 as a sum of many parts, at once adventurous, troubled, curious and contradictory, radical and middle class. The photos singled out an instant and provided audiences fifty years later with grand narratives of female bodies and nature and queer friendship, sex and exploration. But Barbara's diary and Terry's letters signal the anguished exhilaration of a new relationship, the wanting, the molten anticipation of it, the insecurities. There's the construction and projection of oneself in pursuit of the love of another, and within that pursuit, the construction of places, too.

SPEAKER_08 52:04

We talked a lot about how much she this period was about, and the reason it's called truant is that she was trying to get away from this life she had led in the 60s, and that meant a lot of travel, that meant a lot of girlfriends. She was never in one place. And so I think that she didn't talk to me about Hornby Island because there were just so many places that she liked that for her. There was not it the funny thing about Barbara, it's like she was so on the move, she was so on the go. Her mind was always roving. She was on, I mean, the reason she didn't want to deal with the photographs is because she was too interested in what she was working on now. And she was thinking, why are you so interested in my deal with that when I'm dead?

SPEAKER_01 52:49

Mom tried to create um events for us, uh simple events, but they were events. And one of the trips was uh a ferry trip out to Hornby Island. It was you know the special thing that we'd go out and see. Um, I clearly she had been there before. Um, as I'm thinking about it, I remember her saying, I I I had a chance to go to this really cool island. I want you to come see it. It's this communal place where you know there's um a great spirit. And so um we went out on a separate trip from the ones of these photos, and um and we spent the whole day, you know, kind of walking along and exploring. And really, I guess now that I've seen these photos, the relationship, it meant that um bee must have represented uh a special connection, almost a fulfillment of a creative spirit combined with um a utopian sensibility about what a community could be and what life could be. And one of the reasons Terry had chosen to go to Vancouver and not take the position at Stanford was uh because of the Vietnam War, because of her um bitter disillusionment with um social change and the American government and the risk, I think honestly, of raising a son um in an environment where she saw it as a a neo-fascist um um military-industrial complex state. And so she wanted to break away from that.

SPEAKER_12 54:34

Who and what lives beyond the peripheries of a photograph? Perhaps a landscape is merely the direction in which someone's attention is facing, or perhaps it's imbued with all of the experiences, the knowledge, fantasies, projection, and biases that that person arrives with. The rocks, the air, the water, the light, the wind are not neutral subjects. Barbara's photos are ecstatic impressions of an initial encounter with a place and people and the intuitions given to interacting with them for the first time. But what lives beyond? And what kind of photos would Barbara have made if she'd stayed on Hornby Island for a month? Or a year, or fifty more years. That's to come in chapter two of New Friend.

SPEAKER_07 56:00

I don't know, you didn't think about it. You're just part of it. You know, like I don't know. I love the view. I love, but I didn't think of it as a view. Do you know what I mean? It was just was, it just is. Like sometimes I forget this view. Like I I forget how stunning it is. Usually until I have someone here, but it just is, it's part of me. I just always watch the weather, and it's all about the weather. You know, and like as farmers and fishermen family and fairy, right? It's all about the weather. Like, so to me it's I don't know, I feel integrated, I guess. You know, not totally, I mean like, you know, but definitely it's kind of a funny one yet detached to, you know, I'm looking at it through the glass or whatever, I'm out in it. I don't know.

SPEAKER_12 56:53

New Friend is made with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Barbara Hammer Estate, and the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, as well as 96.5 CHFR, Hornby Islands Friendly Community Radio, and Cashmere Radio, Berlin. The voices of Barbara Hammer and Terry Anderson, via their diary entries and letters, are voiced by Martha Ross. Thank you to Judah Paul, the Seventh Art, and Berkeley Art and Design for generously agreeing to share clips of their interviews with Barbara Hammer for this project. Clips from Barbara Hammer's film X, 1974, Double Strength, 1978, and Tender Fictions, 1996 were present in this chapter. Thank you to all those who contributed their voice to this chapter of New Friend. Barbara Hammer, Flori Burke, Andrew Durbin, Scott Watson, Claire Cronia, Nim Hughes, Elaine Savoy, Judith Lawrence, Martha Ross, Rosemary Allenbach, and Derek Anderson. And to the rocks, wind, water, sky, plants, and all living and non-living beings of Jedi H. Hornby Island, thank you. I extend my gratitude and respectfully acknowledge that these recordings were made on the unceded traditional and ancestral lands of the Comox First Nation.