Mariette Pathy Allen (born in 1940 in Alexandria, Egypt to Hungarian parents) didn’t expect to become a photographer when she attended Fine Arts at University of Pennsylvania, following her passion for painting. It happened that someone in the school suggested Mariette to enroll in a street photography workshop, in Philadelphia. The professor was Harold Feinstein and his way of teaching contributed to completely change the direction of her artistic practice. Right after, In 1968, she was hired by the State Museum of New Jersey to realize a documentary project series about the state and its inhabitants.
The key encounter with transgender people, also occurred in the same way : by chance. In 1978 Mariette travelled to New Orleans on the occasion of Mardi Gras. The hotel she stayed at also housed a group of crossdressers who invited her to join them for breakfast. After breakfast they walked out to the swimming pool. Somebody else started taking pictures. Mariette, fascinated by their look made of eyelashes, wigs and feathers, dared to do the same and gently approached them with her camera. She felt immediately connected with one person in particular, a trans woman named Vicky West. The photographer explained in that moment she had an epiphany : she felt she wasn‘t looking into the eyes of a man or a woman but rather she was looking into a soul. The concept of masculinity and feminity just disappeared, the essence of a human being was really what she was seeing.
Mariette Pathy Allen
© Mariette Pathy Allen
Mariette and Vicky discovered that they lived just 20 blocks away from each other in New York, and they became close friends. Through Vicky West, Mariette Pathy Allen had access to the hidden world of the transgender communities of NYC in the late 70’s and 80’s. She dedicated over 40 years of her photography career entirely to them and she started to attend parties and conferences where she learned more about the communities, their political engagement and their issues. She realized those people were mostly misunderstood and maligned by the general public and it gave a purpose to her work. Mariette Pathy Allen started to question herself about which was the better way to help these people to find their voice and a positive model to identify with. She decided to show them in their most intimate dimension : in their homes, surrounded by their families and their beloved ones. Despite the will to capture them under their best light, Mariette did not wish to shoot a sort of fashion catalogue but, on the contrary to underline their normal life and its human dimension. She also started to do interviews because she didn’t want to be their voice, she wanted them to find their own voice as well.
Mariette Pathy Allen
© Mariette Pathy Allen
Although Pathy Allen work was focused on "de- freaking" the cross-dresser community and fighting against every kind of stigmatization and stereotype, her portraits also own a vibrant aesthetic side. Her exquisite sense of color and her background as a painter and collagist is revealed in her photographic work as well. It leads her to explore color, space, and cultural juxtapositions such as east/west, old/new, handmade/manufactured. The result is probably far away from a certain glossy and strictly glamorous effect, but it remains highly cinematic.
Allen published five books from her portraits and series Transformations: Cross Dressers and Those Who Loved Them (1989) which won a Lambda Literary Award in 2004 ,The Gender Frontiers (2003), Transcuba (2014) and Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand (2017).
The Museum of Sex in New York is exhibiting an important part of the photographer’s work in a show titled Mariette Pathy Allen: Rites of Passage, 1978-2006, as well as correspondence with her subjects and other media and activist memorabilia such as darkroom work prints, photographs from color slides, hand-written notes, DIY programs for events.
The curator and photographer Lissa Rivera also selected several dye-transfer prints from Transformations her first photography book. The rest of the show is a collection of less formal photographs, some tacked up onto the walls and others edited into a ten minute video loop.
Anatomy, sexual preference, and gender identity and expression are not bound together like some immutable pretzel but are separate issues. Most of us are born male or female, but masculinity and femininity are personal expressions. With the breaking apart of this pretzel, an exhilarating expansion of freedom is possible…a rite of passage out of the tyranny of sexual stereotypes altogether.
Her work, which received over fifty rejection letters in the past, is now obtaining all the recognition it fully deserves.