Mariette Pathy Allen

Last updated
Mariette Pathy Allen
Born1940 (age 83–84) Alexandria, Egypt
Alma mater Vassar College University of Pennsylvania
OccupationPhotographer
Websitemariettepathyallen.com

Mariette Pathy Allen (Alexandria, 1940) is a photographer for the transgender, genderfluid, and intersex communities and a writer. She has published five books, Transformations: Cross-dressers and Those Who Love Them (1989), Masked Culture: The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade (1994), The Gender Frontier (2004), [1] [2] TransCuba (2014) [3] and Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand (2017). [4] She is an activist for gender consciousness and reflects positivity towards underrepresented communities.

Contents

Early life and education

Allen was born in Egypt to a wealthy Hungarian family who were involved in the shipping industry. [5] Her first cousin once removed is Mark Pathy.

Allen graduated from Vassar College and then attended the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in Fine Arts and Painting. [6] [7] She took a photography class off campus and switched her focus from painting to photography. [8]

Her background in painting has influenced her photographic work as she has used it to explore "color, space, and cultural juxtapositions". [9]

Career

She discovered that photography was like a passport into the world. This transition gave her the opportunity to meet new people while traveling all over the world. Ultimately, this sparked her career as a photographer where she photographed the transgender community for over 20 years. [1]

In 1978, Allen was staying in the same hotel with a group of cross-dressers celebrating Mardi Gras and was inspired to be begin photographing the intimate and often secretive lives of cross-dressers and transgender individuals. She grew into photojournalism and advocacy for the emergent transgender rights movement in the 1990s. She aims to photograph misunderstood communities in the "daylight of everyday life" and capture humanity with their families, in their careers, at their homes. [10]

Allen wrote Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them in 1989. [11] This book depicts the lives of heterosexual, married men who cross dress. She includes black and white portrait and interviews of her subjects. [10]

In her second book The Gender Frontier (2003), Allen documents the transgender community through political movements and public demonstrations. In 2005, the book was awarded the Lambda Literary Award in the transgender category. [12]

Allen has contributed her work to magazines, books, photography exhibitions and documentaries all over the world. Allen's career highlights include being the photographer for Lee Grant's 1984 documentary What Sex Am I?, Southern Comfort (2001), and Rosa von Praunheim's The Transsexual Menace. Allen took the cover photo of Jamison Green's Becoming a Visible Man. [13] She was an associate producer for an A&E documentary The Transgender Revolution (1998). Her photography has been exhibited in the permanent collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, and the New York Public Library. [10] Allen is unofficially referred to as the "official photographer of the transgender community." [2]

Allen's life's work is being archived by the Duke University Library Archive of Documentary Arts. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cross-dressing</span> Practice of dressing like a different gender

Cross-dressing is the act of wearing clothes traditionally or stereotypically associated with a different gender. From as early as pre-modern history, cross-dressing has been practiced in order to disguise, comfort, entertain, and express oneself.

Tri-Ess is an international educational, social, and support group for heterosexual cross-dressers, their partners, and their families.

International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE) is an American non-profit transgender advocacy organization. The foundation is devoted to "overcoming the intolerance of transvestitism and transsexualism brought about by widespread ignorance."

Loren Rex Cameron was an American photographer, author and transgender activist. His work includes portraits and self-portraits consisting of transsexual bodies, particularly trans men, in both clothed and nude form.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tee Corinne</span> American artist

Tee A. Corinne was an American photographer, author, and editor notable for the portrayal of sexuality in her artwork. According to Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia, "Corinne is one of the most visible and accessible lesbian artists in the world."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harold Feinstein</span> American photographer

Harold Martin Feinstein was an American photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keri Pickett</span> American photographer, author and filmmaker

Keri Pickett is an American photographer, author and filmmaker. Pickett's work "pulls subjects from the edges of public awareness to the center of the frame". Pickett was first exposed to photography as a child through her figure-skater/photographer uncle Roy Blakey and years later, as an adult, she made a film about his life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Stryker</span> American professor, historian, author, and filmmaker

Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, historian, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, and is currently on leave while holding an appointment as Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at Mills College. Stryker serves on the Advisory Council of METI and the Advisory Board of the Digital Transgender Archive. Stryker, who is a transgender woman, is the author of several books about LGBT history and culture. She is a leading scholar of transgender history.

Joy Ladin is an American poet and the former David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University. She was the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution.

Zackary Drucker is an American multimedia artist, cultural producer, LGBT activist, actress, and television producer. She is an Emmy-nominated producer for the docu-series This Is Me, a consultant on the TV series Transparent, and is based out of Los Angeles. Drucker is an artist whose work explores themes of gender and sexuality and critiques predominant two-dimensional representations. Drucker has stated that she considers discovering, telling, and preserving trans history to be not only an artistic opportunity but a political responsibility. Drucker's work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and film festivals including but not limited to the 2014 Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Hammer Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ryka Aoki</span> American author

Ryka Aoki is an American author of novels, poetry, and essays. She teaches English at Santa Monica College and gender studies at Antioch University.

Jill Posener is a British photographer and playwright, known for her exploration of lesbian identity and erotica.

Amos Mac is an American writer, photographer and a publisher from Augusta, Georgia. Mac is based in Los Angeles as a writer for television and film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Casa Susanna</span> 1960s destination for cross-dressing

Casa Susanna was a popular weekend destination in Jewett, New York in the United States, for cross-dressing men and transgender women in the early 1960s. The bungalow camp was run by Susanna Valenti and her wife Maria, who also ran a wig store in town.

Gwen Benaway is a Canadian poet and activist. As of October 2019, she was a PhD candidate in the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto. Benaway has also written non-fiction for The Globe and Mail and Maclean's.

Janine Wiedel is a documentary photographer and visual anthropologist. She was born in New York City, has been based in the UK since 1970, and lives in London. Since the late 1960s she has been working on projects which have become books and exhibitions. In the early 1970s she spent five years working on a project about Irish Travellers; in the late 1970s two years documenting the industrial heartland of Britain. Wiedel's work is socially minded, exploring themes such as resistance, protest, multiculturalism and counterculture movements.

Deborah Bright is a 20th-century American photographer and artist, writer, and educator. She is particularly noted for her imagery and scholarship on queer desire and politics, as well as on the ideologies of American landscape photography. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bright's photographic projects have been exhibited internationally.

Devin Allen is an American photographer, photojournalist, and activist based in Baltimore, Maryland. He gained national attention after the Freddie Gray protests in 2015, when his documentary photograph entitled "Baltimore Uprising" was published as Time magazine's May 2015 cover photo. His documentary photo of the George Floyd protests was published as Time's June 2020 cover.

Jess T. Dugan is an American portrait photographer and educator, living in St. Louis, Missouri. They are currently the 2020–2021 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis.

References

  1. 1 2 Boyd, Helen (September 9, 2015). "Five Questions with...Mariette Pathy Allen". EN|GENDER. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
  2. 1 2 Pathy Allen, Mariette (2007). "Momentum: A Photo Essay of the Transgender Community in the United States Over 30 Years, 1978–2007" (PDF). Sexuality Research and Social Policy. 4 (4): 92–105. doi:10.1525/srsp.2007.4.4.92. S2CID   189931365.[ permanent dead link ]
  3. ↑ "TransCuba". Daylight Books. Archived from the original on 2017-11-08. Retrieved 2018-02-27.
  4. ↑ "Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand". Daylight Books. Archived from the original on 2018-02-27. Retrieved 2018-02-27.
  5. ↑ George Pathy, Headed Top Shipping Concern
  6. ↑ Allen, Mariette Pathy (2016). "Mariette Pathy Allen". www.mariettepathyallen.com. Archived from the original on March 11, 2017. Retrieved January 19, 2017.
  7. ↑ Beete, Paulette (July 9, 2014). "Art Talk with Mariette Pathy Allen". National Endowment for the Arts. USA.gov. Retrieved January 19, 2017.
  8. ↑ "Seeing transgender people through a different lens". The Herald Sun with Chapel-Hill Herald. December 4, 2016. ProQuest   1845682407.
  9. ↑ "Bio". Mariette Pathy Allen. Archived from the original on 2019-04-03. Retrieved 2019-03-08.
  10. 1 2 3 Anderson-Minshall, Jacob (2009). "Mariette Pathy Allen". LGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia. 1: 41.
  11. ↑ Rosenberg, David (3 May 2013). "Moving Portraits of the Transgender Community Over 35 Years". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on 2019-04-03. Retrieved 2019-04-03.
  12. ↑ Cerna, Antonio Gonzalez (2005-07-09). "17th Annual Lambda Literary Awards". Lambda Literary. Archived from the original on 2019-04-19. Retrieved 2017-06-02.
  13. ↑ Allen, Mariette Pathy (2010-11-01). "Connecting body and mind: How transgender people changed their self-image". Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. 20 (3): 267–283. doi:10.1080/0740770X.2010.529248. ISSN   0740-770X. S2CID   144841070.
  14. ↑ "Guide to the Mariette Pathy Allen Photographs and Papers, 1968–2003". David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Archived from the original on 2018-05-31. Retrieved 2018-02-27.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.