I Still Am

a woman, pissed off & curious

by Su Friedrich

Acclaimed filmmaker Su Friedrich takes us on an intimate and visually rich autobiographical journey through her personal journals and letters, showing her artistic influences, sense of humor, and flair for adventure as she describes a trip she took through West Africa in 1976 at the age of 21.

Features 175+ b&w photographs, drawings and archival images.

In 1976, Su Friedrich, the experimental filmmaker and visual artist known for exploring themes of identity, gender, and personal narrative through avant-garde cinema, embarked on a transformative five-month solo trip through nine countries in North and West Africa. Through her letters, diary entries, and images captured in black and white on her 35mm Olympus, she documented her day-to-day encounters with the people she meets from Algeria to Nigeria (during a coup) and from Ghana to Morocco. Friedrich not only weaves a rich tapestry of Africa in the mid-1970s, but she also imbues each page with her thoughts, feelings, and discoveries. She travels south through the Sahara by hitching rides on trucks and recalls her surprise when she appeared in the central market of a town and was quickly invited to stay at the home of one of the curious locals. Thirty-nine years later, Friedrich has unearthed her journals, photographs and letters and has constructed a record of her discoveries on a journey that will resonate with readers who love to travel and fans with wanderlust.

“This book is for/about every woman on every continent who still wants, or who still fights, to be free from the bullshit proffered by the patriarchy, and to all the women who have wandered the world to find the world.” —Su Friedrich

Collected in

New and Forthcoming Books from Seven Stories Press

Buying options

Available for pre-order. This item will be available on March 24, 2026.

Paperback

$45.00

$50.00

Publish Date: 2026-03-24

ISBN: 9781644215005

Pages: 448

“A young lesbian feminist’s casually daring, low-budget trip through Africa in the mid 1970s—that set an impressive filmmaking career on its path—has given birth decades later to a unique book, an eccentric collage of stunning photographs and detailed accounts of places, friends, encounters, and challenges. I Still Am is honest, unembellished, empathetic, and impossible to summarize.”

– Lucy R. Lippard

“Su Friedrich’s travel memoir is delightedly funky and readable. It’s a book to hang out with, savoring the materiality of analog time, and its very real subject which is Africa in the 1970s and how a young queer newly torn away from the cocoon of privilege and lavender collectives made common cause with young Black mothers bursting with muscles and baskets and babies who lightly welcome her into a fragile patch of shared time. I Still Am is a high-risk act of political seeing and being seen and one that manages to come home with a trunkful of memories, vulnerable and frankly shared.”

– Eileen Myles

“I Still Am is a portrait of the artist as a young woman. It’s an expansive, raw, and intimate narrative told in “stereo” as Su of the 1970s and her contemporary self join up to take the reader on a five-month road trip. Deliciously illustrated with compelling photographs, Su never holds back.”

– Accra Shepp

“Su Friedrich's 21-year-old precocious introspections make this whole book fascinating, including how she dealt with so many different social and economic conditions. A great read.”

– Yvonne Rainer

“Clear-eyed and unsentimental, this succeeds as a self-aware meditation on the difficulty of telling complex truths.”

– Publishers Weekly

Experimental filmmaker and visual artist SU FRIEDRICH has written, shot, directed, and edited twenty-seven films since 1979, including The Ties that Bind (1985), Hide and Seek (1996), Gut Renovation (2012), and Today (2022). Her landmark film, Sink or Swim (1990), was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Friedrich has had multiple retrospectives at major museums and film centers, received numerous fellowships and awards including the Cal Arts Alpert Award in the Arts and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation among others, and has had two books recently published about her film work. From 1998-2023 she was Professor of Visual Art in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, where she taught film and video production courses.