Welcome to my website!

Although I expected to devote my professional life to painting, after receiving an MFA from the U. of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts, I took a class in photography with Harold Feinstein. The experience was exhilarating: It felt as if I were given a passport into the world. In what seemed like no time, I was hired by the State Museum of New Jersey to capture "the face of new Jersey". The Philadelphia and NJ photographs, taken in 1968, represent my earliest work.

"People with art" is an ongoing series that also began in 1968. The "a" in art is small as I enjoy defining "art" rather loosely. Sometimes the subject is people making art, people in juxtaposition to art or kitsch, people in art spaces, or even, people as art.

In 1978, I was in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. By fluke, I stayed in the same hotel as a group of crossdressers who invited me to join them for breakfast on the last morning. When I took a group picture, I was moved by the experience of looking into the eyes of one of the people in the group: I felt as if I was looking at the essence of a human being rather than a man or a woman. From 1978 through the '80s, I photographed and interviewed male-to-female crossdressers in relationships to spouses and children, in everyday life. This work culminated in the publication of "Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them", and an exhibition at the Simon Lowinsky Gallery in 1990.

In the '90s, I expanded my work to focus on female-to-male and male-to-female people who live in the gender in which they identify. My photographs are included in Leslie Feinberg's "Transgender Warriors" and Riki Wilchin’s "Read My Lips". My new Book, "The Gender Frontier", published by Kehrer, Heidelberg, Germany, won the 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender/Genderqueer category. It is a collection of photographs, interviews, and essays covering political activism over the past decade, and the range of people that identify as transgender in mainland USA.

Along with exhibitions and books, I make slide presentations on gender issues and consult for documentary films that include transgender themes. In 1998 I worked with Kate Davis and David Heilbroner on a film for A&E television: "The Transgender Revolution". It was the first documentary to emphasize political issues along with personal stories and was nominated for a GLAAD media award.

"Southern Comfort", Kate Davis's next film, for which I also worked as consultant and still photographer, won the 2001 Sundance Film Festival Grand Prize in documentary film. It documents the last year in the life of Robert Eads, a female-to-male transsexual who was dying of ovarian cancer. "The Gender Frontier" includes images taken over many years of the people featured in "Southern Comfort".

Her life's work is being collected by the Archive of Documentary Arts and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

This website will be kept up-to-date with information on exhibitions, slide presentations, reviews of "The Gender Frontier", and new images.

 

Please keep visiting!

Mariette Pathy Allen