Dykes By Lipson, Emily

Developed over several years, DYKES is a 220-page photographic monograph bringing together more than 50 individuals photographed through sustained collaboration, proximity, and trust. Moving between portraiture and fashion image, the book examines dyke identity, aesthetics, gaze, and gender representation from within the community itself. It plays with and subverts long-held stereotypes around how dykes are seen to look, act, and present themselves. Designed by SJT Studio, DYKES positions itself deliberately against the pace and surface-level consumption of fashion photography, privileging long-term engagement and contradiction to allow meaning to accumulate through repetition, mass, and return. Created collaboratively with its subjects, the work recenters a community whose representation has too often been mediated through external frameworks of legibility.