Search results: gender

Belinda, 1967

Nana, 1959

Carla & Zizou, Brasserie Graff, 1963

In December of 1959, Paris’s Place Pigalle was overtaken by the annual carnival, the squares bustling with snake charmers, feral animals held in cages, strippers, and throngs of ecstatic visitors carrying cotton candy. In the midst of it all, the women of Place Blanche lingered hither and thither. It was with these women—a great many of them transgender—and in that era that Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (1918-2002) found his home-away-from home. He stayed there for nine years from 1959-1958, and in 1983, he told their story with his classic monograph Les amies de Place Blanche (The Friends From Place Blache), now a collector’s item.

Nearly 40 years ago this month, athletes on the Yale University Women’s Crew team staged a now-historic protest in support of Title IX, an amendment that outlawed sex-based discrimination in education, including collegiate sports. Although we have come a long way since then, varsity sports— especially contact sports— are normally associated with maleness, despite the talented women playing on fields across the world. For The Bears, Providence-based photographer Alejandra Carles-Tolra chronicles the rise of a new group female athletes who are making waves in the Ivy League sports world: Brown University’s Women’s Rugby team.

For Hymns from the Bedroom, London-based photographer Poem Baker paints intimate portraits of gender non-conforming young adults at home, capturing ephemeral and candid moments of sexual, creative, and personal discovery.

On a hot afternoon in June 2008, Italian photographer Alessandro Vincenzi jumped in to a black and yellow taxi, headed to a deserted parking lot meant for trucks. It was his last day in Mumbai. Normally accompanied by his local fixer, Anil, who was unavailable on this particular day, Vincenzi decided to spend the rest of his day wandering with his camera. After about 40 minutes in the taxi, Vincenzi reached the park and saw an old and abandoned warehouse; he asked the driver to wait outside while he went into the building.

Arshenal

Danay

For Reassign, photographer Claudia Gonzalez traces the complex journey traversed by transgender individuals living in Cuba. By presenting her subjects in a collection of arresting diptychs, one representing the phase proceeding the gender reassignment process and the other following it, she resoundingly affirms the identities that have so often been denied throughout the country’s tumultuous history.

Chadric Devin (MFA 2015) is a Missouri-born artist and MFA candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in Gilbert, AZ, The Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, IN, and in Xi’an, China. His current work, Active Bodies: Physical and Nonphysical Interactions within the Male Gender, utilizes printmaking and alternative photographic processes to discuss the intricacy of the filial, social, and cultural relationships between men. He explores these ideas through a variety of materials that range from handmade Japanese paper to nontraditional surfaces, such as athletic tape.

For Mandy and Eva, Amsterdam-based photographer Willeke Duijvekam chronicles the lives of two transgender girls throughout the duration of their adolescence. Though both were assigned to the male sex at birth, each identifies as female and navigates the world as any girl their age, encountering the complexities and joys of teenage girlhood in their own ways and on their own terms. Duijvekam traces their lives for six years, evolving from girls to young women right before her eyes.

For Female to “Male,” Toronto-based photographer Wynne Neilly closely documents his own gender transition. Each week after receiving his testosterone shot, Neilly shot himself on instant film, preserving forever the memory of a specific moment during his evolution. In these intensely personal snapshots, Neilly’s exposed body stands alone, existing within a vacuum of white space. Sequenced and neatly aligned, these aggregate dates cease to be distinct, blurring together into a single fluid narrative of self-actualization.

For Call Me Heena, Bangladeshi photographer Shahria Sharmin intimately explores the country’s Hijra community, composed of people who were assigned male anatomies at birth but identify as being internally female. Sharmin explains that the Hijra identity exists outside of Western definitions like transgender and is perhaps better described as a third gender. Hijras adopt traditionally female roles, becoming mothers and wives, although their marriages are not recognized legally.