Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic…
One can almost see it: a smile of satisfaction spreading across Amelio Robles’s face as he looks at the studio portrait in which he poses like a dandy: dark suit, white shirt, tie, wide-brimmed black hat, leather shoes, and a white handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket.¹ Standing with a cigarette in one hand…
Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits is a unique and extraordinary photographic collection by artist Loren Cameron. Body Alchemy is Loren Cameron’s intensely personal photo documentary of female-to-male transsexuals (FTMs). A transsexual himself, Cameron brings a sensitive, sophisticated insider’s eye to his subject matter. Using documentary style, a series of before-and-after photographs documenting the transformation of a…
T! is a zine about testosterone – endogenous, exogenous, loved, hated, complicated. Containing personal essay, digital art, fiction, collage, a board game and even a recipe, T! is a collection of thoughts about testosterone that run counter to the dominant bioessentialist narrative. Part fact and part fiction, part comedy and part instruction manual, part love…
An anthology ‘coffee table’ book on FTM transition. There are images and profile-interviews with trans men, essays on topics like sacred spirituality and trans men in history. All in all, a bit of an odd collection but also an interesting time capsule. Caution! Kotula’s photography includes step-by-step images of surgery-in-process (which may or may not…
By Claude Summers, 2012 A distinctly queer presence permeates the history of the visual arts — from Michelangelo’s David and homoerotic images on ancient Greek vases to Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits and the photography of Claude Cahun and Robert Mapplethorpe. The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts is a comprehensive work showcasing the enormous contribution of…
Throughout her life and career, Bornstein has defied the rules. Vox Aperture’s “Future Gender” issue, Bornstein spoke with guest editor Zackary Drucker about trans pioneers, the thrill of pornography, and the young photographers envisioning the next frontier in gender expression.
This article examines the aesthetic strategy of flash photography to visualize everyday violence against trans people in the visual art of Heather Cassils (2011–14). In addition to using photographic flashes to blind audiences, these works reference violence on multiple levels: institutional discrimination through the location in an empty archive room, killings through martial arts choreographies,…
Most writing on transgender cinema focuses on representations of trans people, rather than works made by trans people. This article surveys the history of trans and gender variant people creating audiovisual media from the beginning of cinema through today. From the professional gender impersonators of the stage who crossed into film during the medium’s first…
This chapter attends to the importance of building infrastructures of and for Trans- Feminist and Queer (TFQ) cabarets across platforms in order to host the cabaret’s mobility, and the conditions of vulnerability and risk that emerge for trans- feminist and queer performers and audiences with each new physical and online venue. TFQ scenes tend to…