“I seem to operate on flukes,” says American photographer Mariette Pathy Allen, who began documenting the transgender community after finding herself drawn to a group in the dining room of her New Orleans hotel during Mardi Gras in 1978.
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“I always felt there was something wrong with society’s rules that said men are supposed to be one way and women are supposed to be another,” Allen says. “I was always thinking about big issues like, ‘How do we determine who we are?’ Then I met these wonderful people and I felt like they were living the questions that I was asking myself.”
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From that serendipitous encounter in the lobby, a bond was formed, one that empowered Allen to document trans communities in the United States, Cuba, Burma, Thailand, and Mexico. In the new exhibition, Transformations, Allen revisits portraits made between 1978 and 1989 when the trans and gender-variant community was still very much underground.
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