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), TransCuba (2014) and Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand (2017). She is an activist for gender consciousness and reflects positivity towards underrepresented communities.
KT: How did you get into photography? When/what was your first encounter with Art & Activism together?
MPA: I was a painter when I took a class with Harold Feinstein, the renowned photographer and teacher. I enjoyed it so much that I continued.
KT: Being involved with gender-nonconforming subjects since the late 70s, when did you start photographing the transgender community? What caught your attention in the first place?
MPA: I started photographing crossdressers in 1978 when I first met a group who were staying at the same hotel where my husband and I were staying. We were there for Mardi Gras, an annual festival in New Orleans, Louisianna. I became close friends with one of the people I met there, who turned out to live near me in NYC. She took me into her life. I went to all sorts of events, met her friends, and gradually, more and more people.
KT: You have published a series of very special artist books’ – ‘Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them (1990)’, ‘The Gender Frontier’(2003), ‘TransCuba’ (2014) and recent one being ‘Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand’ which focuses on transgender community scene in South-East Asia. What do you like about the medium of photography in book format?
MPA: I love books because you can include a whole visual story, choreograph the photographs in all sorts of ways, depending on what you want the book to express. And, of course, you can include text. I also like to exhibit much larger images in a gallery. At that size, on a wall, the pictures interact differectly.
