The story
begins, as so many good ones do, at Manhattan’s West 26th Street flea market.
Robert Swope and Michel Hurst, the proprietors of Full House, an antiques
gallery specializing in mid-century wares, discovered a suitcase containing 340
photographs that documented the life of a summer retreat in Hunter, NY, called
Casa Susanna. Immediately intrigued, they brought the suitcase home and began
studying the images inside. Though they generally deal in furniture, not
photography, this particular find seemed to fit right into the logic of their
flea market sleuthing habits. “Our interest in the collection overlaps with our
professional activities as both are about unearthing interesting objects and
artifacts from recent history,” Swope told Hyperallergic via email. “It is
about the rediscovery of what mattered in a certain period, be it a chair, a
lamp, or the expression of a marginal group in society.”
The resort took
its name from its proprietor, Susanna, who, when not at the camp, was known as
Tito Valenti. Valenti’s wife, Marie, ran a wig shop in New York City. From the
mid-1950s through the early 1960s, a group of heterosexual men, many of them
married with families, spent weekends at Casa Susanna dressed in feminine
finery. And though they kept their activities under wraps, they clearly
delighted in documenting their time there, perhaps because the photographs made
something in their experience tangible and real.
Indeed, the
realness of the pictures gives them a tender sort of innocence: they are not
remotely sexualized or “naughty,” but sweet and domestic. “The fact that it is
not sexual is a great part of the interest,” says Swope. “It signals that these
photos are talking about something else more mysterious and important. An
audience in the ’60s would never have seen these photos — they were never meant
to be seen by anyone outside of the group. They were private and dangerous. In
2014 a large audience is open to learn about and explore all sorts of diverse
identities. The phenomenon of cross-dressing and gender identification — as old
as the world — is as relevant today as it has always been, and its discussion
more openly so.”
In the late
1950s and early 60s, Tito Valenti, a court translator, and his wife Marie, who
had a wig shop in Manhattan, transformed a property they had purchased with
land deep in the Catskills near Hunter, New York, into a welcoming,
non-judgemental resort for gender-nonconforming individuals. The couple named
the hideaway Casa Susanna, using the name Tito went by when he dressed as a
woman. Attendees of Casa Susanna would take photographs, documenting their
experiences with unprecedented candour, which speaks to the freedom they felt
within its confines. “We’re showing 110 in [Another Kind of Life] but there
were about 340 [photographs] in the collection in total,” says Barbican curator
Alona Pardo of the vast number of images taken at Casa Susanna which were
discovered by chance at a New York flea market in 2004, and now feature in
London exhibition Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins. Those who
stayed at Casa Susanna on weekends were afforded a freedom there that they
could not enjoy openly in their contemporary society; with homosexuality still
illegal, repercussions for the transgender and transvestite community were also
keenly felt.
Pardo points
out that since relatively little is known about this community, it’s difficult
today to attribute any label to its members. “They referred to themselves at
the time as transvestites but you wouldn’t necessarily use that term now,” she
explains. “We would call it gender non-conforming, because we don’t know
whether they were men who dressed as women sometimes or whether they became
transgender or did undergo gender reassignment surgery.” What is clear from the
photographic records of Casa Susanna is the way in which the people who visited
were able to explore what it means to be women. “What sticks is they’re cross
dressing, but within that they’re constantly playing with female stereotypes,
they were very aware,” says Pardo. “There’s pictures of them holding Vogue
magazine and things like that, so we know that they’re looking for notions of
what femininity was, and they were playing with those guises.”
There was a
performativity to Casa Susanna, then, in some ways: “One day they could very
housewifey, the next day they could be a group of women together having a
gossip over tea.” Photography played an important role in this performativity,
as they relaxed in front of the camera and took a certain pride in documenting
their lives in the Catskills; this documentation proved significant in how they
developed their gender identities. “This idea of selfies, self-portraiture, the
memorialisation of this moment living as women – they were photographing
themselves as women,” says Pardo. “The photography becomes a pivotal medium
through which they can construct their identities and affirm them, and I think
that is really critical.” The ability to record this side of their lives
offered a gratification; indeed, some of the photographs were used as Christmas
cards, and activities offered at the retreat included make-up lessons with
Marie Valenti.
Pardo
continues: “This is the time where portable cameras are becoming more
commonplace and a lot more people can begin to record these private moments.
[At Casa Susanna] they’re obviously playing with that and performing to camera
– it was about solidifying their existence as women and presenting themselves
to the world.” There were limits, however, to the group’s visibility in front
of the camera: most of the photographs were taken inside, “in sitting rooms and
bedrooms, with the curtains are always closed, making sure there were no prying
eyes. This sense of privacy, was absolutely critical.”
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