Mariette Pathy Allen

Mariette Pathy Allen
Born

1940 (age 76–77)

Alexandria, Egypt
Residence New York City, U.S.
Alma mater

Vassar College

University of Pennsylvania
Occupation Photographer

Mariette Pathy Allen is an award-winning photographer for the transgender, genderfluid, and intersex communities and a writer. She has written two books, Transformations: Cross-dressers and Those Who Love Them and The Gender Frontier.[1][2] She is an activist for gender consciousness and reflects positivity towards underrepresented communities.

Early life

Mariette Pathy Allen graduated from Vassar College and then attended the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in Fine Arts and Painting.[3][4]

Education

Mariette Pathy Allen graduated with an MFA from the school of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She took a photography class off campus and switched her focus from painting to photography.[5] She discovered that photography was like a passport into the world. This transition gave her the opportunity to meet new people while traveling all over the world. Ultimately, this sparked her career as a photographer where she photographed the transgender community for over 20 years.[1]

Career

In 1978, Mariette Pathy Allen was staying in the same hotel with a group of cross-dressers celebrating Mardi Gras and was inspired to be begin photographing the intimate and often secretive lives of cross-dressers and transgender individuals. She grew into photojournalism and advocacy for the emergent transgender rights movement in the 1990s. She aims to photograph misunderstood communities in the “daylight of everyday life” and capture humanity with their families, in their careers, at their homes.[6]

Allen wrote Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them in 1989. This book depicts the lives of heterosexual, married men who cross dress. She includes black and white portrait and interviews of her subjects.[6]

In her second book The Gender Frontier (2003), Allen documents the transgender community through political movements and public demonstrations. In 2005, the book was awarded the Lambda Literary Award in the transgender category.[7]

Mariette Pathy Allen has contributed her work to magazines, books, photography exhibitions and documentaries all over the world. Allen’s career highlights include being the photographer for Lee Grant’s 1984 documentary What Sex Am I?, Southern Comfort (2001), and Rosa von Praunheim’s The Transsexual Menace. She was an associate producer for an A&E documentary The Transgender Revolution (1998). Her photography has been exhibited in the permanent collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the New York Public Library.[6]

Legacy

Allen is unofficially referred to as the “official photographer of the transgender community.”[2] Her book The Gender Frontier won the Lambda Lit Award in the Transgender category and Allen also took the cover photo of Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man.[8]

References

  1. 1 2 Boyd, Helen (September 9, 2015). "Five Questions with...Mariette Pathy Allen". EN|GENDER. EN|GENDER. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
  2. 1 2 Pathy Allen, Mariette (2007). "Momentum: A Photo Essay of the Transgender Community in the United States Over 30 Years, 1978–2007" (PDF). Sexuality Research & Social Policy: Journal of NSRC. 4: 92–105.
  3. ↑ Allen, Mariette Pathy (2016). "Mariette Pathy Allen". www.mariettepathyallen.com. Retrieved January 19, 2017.
  4. ↑ Beete, Paulette (July 9, 2014). "Art Talk with Mariette Pathy Allen". National Endowment for the Arts. USA.gov. Retrieved January 19, 2017.
  5. ↑ "Seeing transgender people through a different lens". The Hereld Sun with Chapel-Hill Herald. December 4, 2016. Retrieved February 13, 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 Anderson-Minshall, Jacob (2009). "Mariette Pathy Allen". LGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia. 1: 41.
  7. ↑ Cerna, Antonio Gonzalez (2005-07-09). "17th Annual Lambda Literary Awards". Lambda Literary. Retrieved 2017-06-02.
  8. ↑ Allen, Mariette Pathy (2010-11-01). "Connecting body and mind: How transgender people changed their self-image". Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. 20 (3): 267–283. ISSN 0740-770X. doi:10.1080/0740770X.2010.529248.
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