Tessa Boffin Archive

Tessa Boffin was a photographer working from the 1980s (until her death in 1993), who taught at the Kent Institute of Art and Design (now part of the University for the Creative Arts). She specialised in LGBT issues, including work in response to HIV/AIDS and to cross-dressing. She co-curated the exhibition Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology producing a book of the same title (1990), and also co-edited Second Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs (1991)

Her archive consists of her teaching and research work, administrative publication work, technical photography books, and her project work, including her photographic inspiration notebooks, where she reviews television programmes, relating to AIDS and homosexuality, including Panorama, concept photographs of her cross dressing and safe sex project, The Sailor and the Showgirl and the cross-dressing project Billboard, which was based on the real life case of Jennifer Saunders, who was accused of raping women while pretending to be a male.

The University for the Creative Arts also holds her personal library of books, many of which are annotated.

This archive is interesting from an LGBT view, a social history point of view, notably in regards to how AIDS were perceived as early as the 1980s, and a technical photography perspective.

The Tessa Boffin Archive can be accessed here archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb3094-boff

Further information relating to Tessa Boffin can be found on the glbtq Glossary

Rebekah Taylor, University for the Creative Arts

 

 

 

Sailor and the Showgirl, cross-dressing and safe sex project

Billboard project	Ecstatic antibodies, edited by Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta Find on Copac	Stolen Glances, Lesbians Take Photographs, edited by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser Find on Copac

All images copyright the University for the Creative Arts and the Boffin Estate