Anonymous – Two women engaged in oral sex (c. 1895)

With the invention of the daguerrotype in 1839, photography was
enlisted in the production of pornography. By the 1880s, when
developments in photographic technology brought cameras into the
middle-class home, amateurs could produce not only their own portraits
and snapshots but also the means of their own arousal. This pocket-sized
photograph is one of some 50,000 erotic images – professional and
amateur – that pioneer sexologist Dr Alfred Kinsey began to collect in
the late 1930s, working with difficulty around obscenity laws and codes
of ‘public’ morality. Taken not in a conventional studio but in a homey
Victorian bedroom, this representation of cunnilingus was probably
intended for illicit heterosexual male consumption, though one hopes
that at least a few women managed to put it to good use. The woman
sitting demurely on the bed wears an apron, indicating that male
fantasies about the sexual availability of domestic servants was
operative in the production of the image. Unlike in most erotic
photographs of the period, the face of the sitting women has been
crudely blacked out.

–Catherine Lord, Art & Queer Culture (New York: Phaidon, 2013), 59.

(via @lesbianartandartists​)