Mariette Pathy Allen has been photographing the transgender community for over 40 years, and now there is an excellent retrospective of her work at the Museum of Sex in New York
Her archive consists of thousands of photographs, countless interview transcripts, personal correspondence, and materials related to a career dedicated to supporting and documenting trans and gender-variant communities.
The selection of work in the Exhibit highlights a time before the internet, when often hard-to-find newsletters and magazines were essential lifelines, and protests and in-person conferences were one of the few safe spaces to be ‘out.
A great many of the individuals Allen photographed became as close as family, and the first of five books, Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them (1989), was a landmark for gender variant awareness. Her second book The Gender Frontier is a collection of photographs, interviews, and essays covering political activism, youth, and the range of people that identify as transgender in mainland USA. It won the 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender/Genderqueer category.
MARIETTE PATHY ALLEN: RITES OF PASSAGE, 1978-2006 Museum of Sex 233 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 https://www.museumofsex.com/ Until January 2020
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Labels: 2019, NY, photography exhibit
