Lived Experience: Delphine Diallo's powerful portraits of LGBT+ people aged over 50

Photographer and visual artist Delphine Diallo hopes to bring them to light in a new series on LGBT+ people aged over fifty. This is a generation that has witnessed incredible tragedy and triumph, a generation that has lived in fear of loving who they love and who has been ravaged by the AIDS epidemic, but who has also witnessed the extraordinary progress in rights, visibility, and acceptance that has taken place over the past fifty years.

Comprised of over sixty powerful portraits of people from all walks of life, together with interviews conducted by Delphine, Lived Experience honours and celebrates their rich, complex, and varied lives, offering unforgettable stories and intimate reflections on love and loss, on family and friendship, on building community, and the importance of remembering the past and the LGBT+ movement's radical roots.

Available in a new book, Lived Experience, is a sweeping picture of how decades of activism have impacted the everyday lives of so many and acts as a reminder that the fight for equality is not yet over.

"The journeys of the people in this book showed the beauty of life, from overcoming loneliness, pain, sadness, and loss to accepting who they really are and acknowledging their strength and determination when it comes to the way they have chosen to live," Delphine says. "I feel so honoured to have had the opportunity to hear these voices. Their words are a reminder of how acceptance and forgiveness, without judgment, can raise the consciousness of society."

Debbie Millman is amongst the subjects and shares her own story: "I didn't understand the concept of being gay until I was in college and I worked for the student newspaper. We were doing a special issue on LGBT+ people ... I interviewed a gay woman, and suddenly I had this sort of sense that being gay was being home."

Delphine Diallo is a Brooklyn-based French and Senegalese visual artist and photographer. She graduated from the Académie Charpentier School of Visual Art in Paris in 1999 before working in the music industry for seven years as a special effect motion artist, video editor, and graphic designer. In 2008, after working as a corporate art director in Paris, she moved to New York to explore her own practice. Diallo combines artistry with activism, pushing the many possibilities of empowering women, youth, and cultural minorities through visual provocation.

Lived Experience is the thirteenth title in this critically acclaimed photobook series which is a unique collaboration between the Arcus Foundation, Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS) and The New Press.