Women According to Nadia Lee Cohen

 

Nadia Lee Cohen’s work needs little introduction on i-D. From her collaboration with Millicent Hailes in 2015 to her solo show in Spain last summer, we’ve been, like so many others, continually fascinated by the elevated, cinematic portrayals of womanhood the photographer creates. And, like a method actor continually fine-tuning her role as one such woman, Nadia too remained a source of fascination; just as mythologised as the bodies in her images.

Based in Los Angeles and often assumed to be American, owing to the recurring motifs of old Hollywood and classic Americana in her work, Nadia in fact grew up in London, moving west after graduating from London College of Fashion. This lineage, and its juxtapositions, can be traced throughout her first book, Women, an anthology of her signature work.

 
A mixture of subjects, some haughty looking, others less guarded, some familiar, some unknown, the book embodies the very best of Nadia’s world. Whether it’s Alexa (Demie) poolside, caked in makeup but still tanning herself beneath the Hollywood sign, or Lilly, tentatively peering out of her curtains yet completely nude, or Anja, pregnant, solemn, leaning against a kitchen counter, there’s infinite stories wrought across each of their faces and bodies.
 
Here, Angela Hill of IDEA, the publishers behind Women -- its fastest selling book of all time -- discusses with her the long journey to creation, the many different artists, actors and directors that informed its narrative, and shooting Charli XCX in a motel full of sex workers and customers.

 
**What were you like as a child and how was your childhood?
 
**I was quite unfeminine, didn’t like wearing dresses or brushing my hair. I was raised on a farm in rural England by very relaxed parents. I spent my time running around wet fields covered in mud, hunting for fossils, stepping in cow shit and building fairy houses out of twigs. I believed in everything there was to believe in; Father Christmas, witches, fairies -- the lot. Nothing could stunt or interrupt my imagination, probably because of how remote the surroundings were.
 
**Why was I so moved by these images? I was hesitant about publishing this book at first, it was the polar opposite of everything we had done before and I am steeped in my love of documentary-style grunge street-type photography. At first the images are brash and obvious and screaming out at you from the page. When we received the first advance copies in the office. I looked through the book and felt more and more emotional. I walked home mentally going over details from some of the images, some subjects appeared so desolate to me, so beaten up by life (we see Scarlett, young yes but already having that world weary look, sitting simultaneously smoking and breast feeding in Hampstead; the lighting is exquisite, the setting dark and heavy, foreboding almost. On later viewings of this image I am drawn to the toast rack, flowers and vase; exactly the vase and flowers my grandmother would have. It’s one of my favourite images in the book), there was a sadness, more than a melancholy, because maybe one indulges in melancholy from time to time and these felt like lives lived that there was a lot to forget about.
 
**I was reminded of the film The Thin Blue Line (1988) -- both in terms of the imagery/scenarios and the soundtrack too which is in turns haunting, plaintive and beautiful. The film is a reconstruction documentary (and was controversial because of this) as is Women.

 
**The location of the last image in the book is of a flat in Finchley and I was reminded of November Sunday evenings at home, suburban London, as a teenager; a feeling of despair, a heaviness, the thought of school the next day, the routine of every Sunday. I got the feeling some of the women you photographed were left alone in every sense after the shoot -- all the glitz and glamour gone -- just themselves to deal with. Is this a valid assumption?
 
**I agree in the sense that there is an approach of adding and subtracting throughout. Adding in terms of the hair, makeup, nails, and general theatrics of their appearance. Subtraction however, in the form of the setting, posing and mood; this is where the darker element settles in. The locations, even if domestic, tend to be somewhat remote or desolate. I'm personally drawn to this sort of space and want the models to reflect their surroundings in their pose, or ‘non-pose’ actually. The idea is that they are captured mid-movement, off guard, or a split second after asking them to relax, slump, hunch, ‘be sleepy’, etc. The majority of the best images seem to be towards the end of a shoot, when the model is maybe slightly more comfortable and has had time to settle into the situation and accept their respective character. Scarlett in particular — tiny baby Mosco was only two months old and was screaming and crying as he didn’t want to feed, the atmosphere was quite intense until he eventually latched on after around eight attempts, so there was a genuine sense of relief felt at the moment that photo was taken.

 
You are in the book, maybe in more ways than just your self portrait. A photographer friend of ours was in the office recently and he said something very interesting in that he didn’t resonate with other photographers’ work if he couldn’t see something of that photographer in their work. And then I thought of how much of Nan Goldin’s work is Nan Goldin herself, or Corinne Day or Tina Barney themselves. We see Finchley and Hampstead juxtaposed with Palm Springs, Brooklyn and LA in the location credits; was it just a practical decision as that was where the models were or was it important for you to revisit your London background and mix it with the high contrast of LA?
 
It did feel important to have London in there. This was one of the elements I felt missing when I looked at the body of work around two years ago; so I made a conscious effort to photograph the places that resonated. The sentimentality is present in the smaller details such as the popping burnt toast and patriotic England mug in “Shocking”. Or the copy of The Sunday People and pint of milk in Scarlett’s; these are nostalgic memories for me. I initially wanted to travel to California as it all seemed very preserved in terms of locations and signage that were still intact from the late 70s-early 80s, and I'm definitely not an advocate for modern architecture. I felt this was missing in the UK, but the more time I spent away from the UK the sooner I realised that this isn’t the case at all. I just struggle with a tendency to become blind to what inspires me about a place unless I am away from it for a long period of time. I’ve actually just got back to the UK following the longest I’ve ever been out of the country and the smallest elements start to feel novelty and quintessentially British. I really start to notice and appreciate every Mr Kipling cake.

 
**Do you agree with this sentiment that, like Freud’s dream analysis, you are every subject in this book?
 
**That’s hard to answer without sounding pretentious, but yes, not in an overt way, probably just in the choice of an object. I’m not sure if this is a great example, but there is a wig that is used in several images that we named ‘Aunty Paulene’. The name came from a time when my mum's friend Paulene turned up at her house sporting it and it wasn’t received in the way that she had hoped, as mum fell about laughing. So she quickly whipped it off and I adopted it. The wig actually looks a bit like my hair, so perhaps this suggests some sort of repressed Freudian desire to inflict this hairstyle on several people.
 
**The book was the fastest selling of any book we have published; what do you think most people’s reasons are for wanting these images so much? For me, I want to look at them again and again and every time I do I notice something else (I have the same feeling with Van Gogh, I notice one flower more than I had ever done before or the way the wood in a chair is painted); another intriguing detail, a fold of fabric, colours, lighting -- they are works of art, each one a tableau, a film, movie that the viewer can construct in their mind. How long did it take from the idea of an image to casting, staging and achieving the final print you were happy with?
 
**I can’t get over that and probably never will. I’m completely speechless at the response it had. I don’t know because I can’t look at them from an objective perspective. Though I do think people enjoy narrative and storytelling. I certainly do in the photography work that I admire, even if it is predominantly documentary, the capture of drama within a still image can make the most mundane of situations magical. One of my favourite books is Ray’s a Laugh by Richard Billingham, the situations of his mother and father in a Birmingham council flat have those same feelings that you mentioned for me in terms of noticing something new every time I look at them. I feel like I've gone off topic, so to answer your question it took absolutely ages from initial idea to execution, especially when I ran out of money for production and had to produce the shoots myself; but those were almost the most fun.

 
I have a stream of consciousness that plays out words, stills from films, music, images etc like triggers that inspire me; it changes from time to time but it has long been there since childhood and it often plays out like this; herbs, British Folk Music, Essex Marshes, owls, eagles and kites, Ralph Vaughan Williams, KES, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Go-Between, Edwardiana… like a mantra I have to come back to remember in my work to stick to what is ‘me’. Would you say your main inspiration is film? Which films or directors have really moved you? I love the feeling of watching something and feeling changed afterwards, feeling “OK, that can be done”, “that does exist, that brilliance” and I strive to achieve my goals all over again.
 
 
**Yes and I almost feel guilty for having the same inspirations, but you can’t help what initially shapes you and I continually revisit those with the guilt that I haven’t found something new. A lot of it is from film absolutely, I owe a lot of it to my punk teenage boyfriend who had impeccable taste in film, music and art. I think my taste grew from that. It does come from everywhere though, not just Stanley Kubrick and Fellini. I’m interested in food packaging, signage, pointless trinkets and personal objects in charity shops. Also any artwork that puts a spotlight on mundanity. Duane Hanson’s sculptures epitomise this idea and have been a constant source of wonderment and inspiration. How fabulous would it be to have one in my living room one day.

 
Which was the most difficult image to achieve?

 Charli’s without a doubt. It was photographed towards the end of the project and I had to go back to shooting in a similar style to how I started, with minimal team and minimal funds. Charli is a famous person and we had never met, so when her management asked if there would be ‘security’ at the location I had to explain that there would not… I drove around Hollywood on Friday night to location scout with Sami Knight (hairstylist) and remembered a particular motel. It’s run by this friendly man that I met five years previously, we drove by and it still looked as great as I remembered, he was still there, quietly vacuuming the green carpeted steps outside as though no time had passed. He remembered me and said we could shoot there the next night for the price of a room; $145, a bargain. However, when we turned up the following evening, (now Saturday night) it was quite a different atmosphere. The solitary vacuumer was replaced with a flood of men in tracksuits looking for debauchery. They were intermingled with determined looking sex workers. I found the situation interesting, but Charli’s management didn’t quite feel the same and were terrified generally of placing her in a situation that was unsafe, also concerned that someone might see her and snap a photo on their phone and sell it to TMZ or something. The entire night was a dramatic obstacle course of trying to get this photo at any given quiet moment (there were none). Charli was marvellous though, very calm and this shows in the final image which reflects none of the chaos that was felt that night. This was the only photograph I wrote about in the back of the book, titled ‘Motel Notes’.

 **Can you remember when you first thought of doing this series or was it that it was only after meeting one particular woman that you felt inspired to make it a project?

 **I started in university, it was part of a project that I shot for my end of year assignment and I was naive enough to think that I could complete it in a year. Thank god I didn’t, it would have been terrible. My tastes changed and developed so much over the course of its progress, though there are one or two still in the book from those very early photo shoots that show the progression.

 **What next for you? What is driving you forward into 2021?

 **I’m the worst at working on more than one thing at a time. I was supposed to be working on something else last year but I put everything off in order to get the book out. I’m reluctant to mention what the next thing might be in case it ends up taking me just as long to complete!

 Nadia Lee Cohen’s Women is surreal, sad and sexy. By Ryan White. i-D , December 18,  2020.

 

Nadia Lee Cohen is only 29, but you’d be forgiven for thinking she’s a behemoth of image-making. One look at her debut book, Women, published by IDEA, and you’ll see why.

 
The fruit of six years’ labour, Women brings together 100 portraits of staggering power and beauty. Kept under wraps for the majority of that time, the project was carried out in secret, alongside her work as a director, and was completed in lockdown.
 
“The word ‘Women’ in this case is an idea related to ‘character’,” Cohen says of the title. “It doesn’t reside in the world we live in, nor does it share the same politics, beauty norms or values. It stands as a representation of strong femininity within a series of these 100 mise-en-scêne.”
 
The book sees Cohen capture people of all ages, shapes and sizes, in various states of undress. Each subject appears to be at total ease in front of the camera, unflinching and unapologetic in their femininity.
 
“Regardless of their assigned character, the level of nudity is determined by whatever the individual personally believes it is to feel ‘unclothed’,” the photographer says of the nudity in the book. “This naturally differs between subjects; however, it is, perhaps, the most harmonising thread that injects a universal feeling of strength to these images. The most important character trait being that these ‘Women’ are not weak, they feel empowered and, in turn, empower.”
 
Power is the key word here – these images vibrate with the stuff. They confront you. Command you. Compel you. Meet your gaze head on. And they are full of contradictions, too: simultaneously retro and modern, they draw on a legacy of British and American cinema, but feel new and current. Likewise they are staged and stylised, but at the same time real and irrefutably raw. Meanwhile, the women themselves display both a vulnerability and a strength, presenting a fictional character and also their true self, or at least a version of it. It’s hard to look away and even harder not to feel something.
A gold clothbound hardback, the book itself is a beautiful object in its own right, featuring a foreword by Ellen von Unwerth who praises Cohen’s talent for “skilfully interweaving the equally fascinating creepiness and glamour inherent of American culture”, and an introduction by Alessia Glaviano of Vogue Italia.
 
Here, Cohen discusses this project in further detail, expanding on the process of completing the book and the women at the centre of it.
 
Ted Stansfield: Please can you introduce this book?
 
Nadia Lee Cohen: You might have thought I’d had enough time to think of something a little more profound to say as a response … but here’s what I have: it’s my first photo book and it’s incredibly special to me. It’s a book of stories featuring people I admire in one way or another, each filling the role of an imagined fictional narrative.
 
TS: It is the result of more than six years of work. Can you tell me about the origins of the book, the process of putting it together, and how it feels to have completed it?
 
NLC: Honestly, it’s the largest sense of relief I’ve ever felt. I probably could have gone on for another 16 years but for a much-needed motivational intervention. I started it in university and had the unrealistic idea that I could complete it in a year. How wrong this was. My tastes changed both personally and as an image-maker. Also, taking on work as a director as a means to fund the book slowed down its progress. Though without sounding all doom and gloom, this element in particular I think aided the creation of the imagery, there was an elevation in terms of preconceived narrative, set design, lighting and general character creation. The concepts were more thoughtfully conceived like film stills rather than still images and I was no longer shooting in my mum and dad’s shed.
 
The main frustration was trying to complete the book while simultaneously attempting to keep each image secret. This proved pretty difficult, as people would ask ’how’s the book coming?’ and I was unable to show them anything I’d shot. In a world where we’re so used to instant recognition as a response to imagery, this lack of validation was slightly nerve wracking in terms of wondering if what I’d captured was worthy of a photo book.
 
The pandemic played a pretty considerable part in the book’s completion. Spending weeks inside forced me to face the daunting task of printing and arranging the images around my LA apartment like some sort of crime scene web. Pinning notes to them and obsessing about what needed to be altered, what was missing, have I used this wig too many times? Etc ...

 
TS: Despite the fact that the images were shot over multiple years and in multiple locations, there’s such a strong sense of cohesion to them. How did you achieve this?
 
NLC: Thank you. The stories are pretty similar in tone, although there are differing themes of mundanity, loss, elation, etc, there is a harmonious thread of strength I think that unites them.
 
TS: What is your relationship to these women? How did you cast them and what qualities do you think they share?
 
NLC: On a personal level, some are extremely close friends, others are people I have only met once with the intention of photographing them for the book; together they are all individuals that I admire in one way or another. On a fictional level I feel incredibly connected to their respective characters. The catalyst behind these imagined scenarios were the models themselves, in effect they were the initial spark and inspiration for the birth and progression of each character.

 
TS: There’s such a sense of intimacy to these images. A physical intimacy, yes, but an emotional one too. Is that fair? As a photographer, were you removed from your subjects or were (or are) you emotionally involved?
 
NLC: Emotionally involved in their fictional lives, yes. Even if the subject was a close friend, without risk of sounding like a low-budget ’medium’, there was perhaps a moment where we both disconnected and a new devised character entered the room and took their place. In certain cases after the wigs, make-up and costume design was complete we’d say shall we call them Shirley? Shall we call them Pam? When referring to this fictional creation staring back at us. The point is they weren’t playing themselves, I find when someone’s appearance is altered (at times) almost beyond recognition this brings out something that neither of you recognise in the photograph, even if you know each other very well, that seems to be where the magic is.
 
TS: Unlike a series of images of women by a male photographer, there is that sense of involvement, I think, and empathy in this book. What is your understanding of the female gaze and how is that expressed in this book?
 
NLC: It was a collaborative process in the sense that it was important for me to understand and empathise through each situation what the model felt comfortable with, then together we devised a way to work that into their respective character. I understand first-hand the vulnerability felt in posing, especially without the comfort and barrier of clothing, so there was a mutual awareness throughout.

 
TS: That sense of understanding and empathy is also illustrated in your decision to pose for the book yourself. Can you tell me about the thought process behind this decision and what you hoped to achieve by doing this?
 
NLC: It made the project more personal, had I chosen not to pose it might have made the overall tone feel more voyeuristic as though I was looking inwards at this world, rather than us all looking out.
 
TS: In the pantheon of female representation in art and photography, what do you hope this body of work stands for; what do you hope it achieves?
 
NLC: An intertwining of honesty and fiction. Something that people can relate to whether emotionally or physically. I’d like there to be some longevity in the project, imagery in the contemporary world currently feels quite disposable and transient. For me, a photo book surpasses this and lives with the viewer a little longer, and might be something they pick up and look at again in years to come.

 
TS: What do you hope this project expresses about the lived experience of women today? What issues does it raise or confront the viewer with?
 
NLC: It is of course fictional, which ultimately leaves it up to the viewer’s subjective interpretation. However, even if these scenarios are imagined, they are ultimately based on truth and real life, there’s nothing fantastical there. They stand as a representation of strong femininity however the individual feels to embody that idea, and this will probably confront each viewer in a different way.
 
TS: The book ends on a sombre note, with a portrait of Elie Che, who tragically died last September. Can you tell me the story behind this image, your memory of Elie and why it felt right to include and conclude with this photograph of her?
 
NLC: There wasn’t a sadness to this image before Elie’s death, she wanted to pose this way as this is how she felt the most beautiful. Though now for me it has a particular poignancy. Her death came as such a sudden shock, her close friends and family reached out to ask that her photograph was released early to honour her memory. The battle for trans people is ongoing, to end with her portrait felt important – it’s not to be thought of as a conclusive ending, more of an ongoing conversation to highlight the reality of this struggle for trans people.
 
Nadia Lee Cohen’s Powerful Portraits of Strong Femininity. By Ted Stansfield. Another, December 9, 2020.

Women by Nadia Lee Cohen.  Another, December 9, 2020

There’s a cautiousness to Nadia Lee Cohen. The photographer-filmmaker is mindful of her words, her associations, her 'brand'. And with 'cancelation' rife for successful creatives (and the executioner’s axe now as menial as a popular tweet), it’s only natural that hyper-consideration become par for the course. But there’s more to it with Cohen. It seems as though she doesn’t fear the fragility of her cultural clout, but that people might uncover she never had any to begin with.
 
Perhaps that’s the reason the LA-based-Brit sweats self-deprecation. Upon charting her career highlights -- which, for the record, include a National Portrait Gallery prize, a high fashion campaign starring Sophia Loren and a music video named among Rolling Stone’s favorites -- she responds by comparing herself to her contemporaries. When congratulated on her accomplishments (all by the age of 28, when most are only beginning to tackle credit card debt), Cohen counters, “Have I [done that much]?” While it may be in the Hollywood handbook that transplants exhibit imposter syndrome, Nadia Lee Cohen needn’t. Her work speaks for itself.
 
In fact, the only time Cohen isn’t careful is with her creative output. Upon completing her photography degree at the London College of Fashion, she relocated to California not to proximate to the world’s A-list, but to acclimatize to the distinct blend of glitz and grit unique to the state — both elements that distinguish Cohen’s style. Her visuals are low-brow and lush: swampy depictions of relatable scenes staged beyond recognition; hedonistic-hued portraits of the human condition that perspire debauchery, always alluding to all seven deadly sins with unwavering consistency. The result is somehow repulsive and compelling all at once — like a bad wax reproduction of Paris Hilton. And just like Paris, it’s all emphatically 'Made in America'.

 
Thus, instead of stargazing, the photographer’s fascination with Americana meant that her early days in LA were spent stalking the city streets at night to shoot without a permit, or taking long road trips with pit stops at gas stations and 99 cent stores to document the 'American Worker'. One particular expedition saw her enter a meth den and inexplicably kicked out of a moving car, after advertising for subjects on Craigslist -- a testament to the lengths she will go to spotlight unseen America, and it’s underbelly.
 
“I loved street casting,” she explains. “It was, 'Who can I get to shoot? That person looks interesting…' I was never really trying to seek out jobs in the entertainment industry, making music videos or shooting anyone famous.”
 
Citing Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing’s comfort in “comically distorting, or even in some cases altering, images to the point of the grotesque” as primary inspirations, Cohen soon transitioned into self-portraits -- transforming into various characters fashioned from the mementos she’d found on the road for one of her most well-known projects, the pointedly probing and monstrously camp, Name Tag.
 

“The idea was very personal to me as it was my perception of who these people were,” Cohen says. “I thought it would be more interesting to have one person interpret and physically embody these characters -- so I did it myself.”
 
Consequently, everyone knows Nadia Lee Cohen’s face and no one does. The photographer has taken many, many selfies, but she’s rarely without wigs or prosthetics. With a light scroll you can see her cosplay jailbirds, judges and nuns, her work splashed across top-tier publications. It grates Cohen’s modeling agency, Wilhelmina, that the photographer has very few images of her looking, well, normal, but she’s just never found natural headshots as “fun”.
 
“It’s really flattering when people want me in front of the camera, and it’s important to know what it feels like,” Cohen shares of modeling. “But I also think you have to be comfortable to show yourself, and doing those projects makes me feel more comfortable. Spending time in front of the camera also encourages me to be more sympathetic to subjects when I am behind it.”

 
With production at a standstill due to coronavirus, Cohen has had little choice but to become her own muse. It’s been frustrating to maintain audience engagement with increasingly personal photos, without flooding out her professional work from her feed. Then there’s the added pressure of her still untitled first book arriving later this year. It’s a compilation of images spanning the course of Cohen’s career, which mandates many of her archival photos go unpublished on social media or news outlets. This marks the first time the project has been officially announced (and some of the photos shared), and while originally slated for a summer release, it has been indefinitely pushed back due to the pandemic -- only limiting the photographer further in what she can share with fans.
 
“A lot of my friends complain about their work not getting as much attention as a selfie,” laughs Cohen. “I think people tend to feel more of a connection to the person from seeing a low resolution, iPhone image of them — it feels as though they are witnessing reality rather than something curated.”
 
Nevertheless, quarantine itself has treated the creative well. Despite only recently dipping her toes in filmmaking (the 'pig police' theme of A$AP Rocky’s “Babushka Boi,” directed by Cohen, recently recirculated on social media as a symbol for law enforcement ineptitude in the ongoing fight against police brutality) she’s been working on a feature concept for several years. FOMO-free due to mandated social distancing and weeding through years of ideas, Cohen’s script is fast-tracking. Still, a sidestep into the film industry was more "hope" than plan.

 
“When I first started making videos it was almost a test to prove to myself I could make my photographs move and it’d be enjoyable to watch,” she says, adding that she’s now shifted her process of conceptualizing projects from visual cues. “[Now] I’ve been thinking about the story in a narrative way, not a visual way. It feels unfamiliar, yet exciting.”
 
Right now, the battle is maintaining focus. Cohen knows too well Instagram can suck you into a vortex of color and self-comparison, and approaches the app with only the utmost trepidation. Nonetheless, her relationship with social media seems relatively healthy. In fact, she finds Instagram’s subtle inauthenticity "comforting" — a stark contrast to the well-documented anxiety most women experience interacting with the platform. To Cohen it’s a casting goldmine: if she requests a “man with a round, hard belly” for a subject, one will be procured through her direct messages in ten minutes flat. She also counts herself lucky that her followers are there for her work first -- whether or not it features the photographer in it.

Hence why she so deeply values her leagues of disciples. Subscribing to Nadia Lee Cohen’s universe is to embrace her perversely glamorous alternate reality, with triple-breasted women and satanic television personalities all in technicolor. She might cast a gaggle of middle-aged playmates to actualize the Valley Of The Dolls’ men-less utopia of her dreams (for the last ever winter issue of Playboy) one moment, and make out with Danny Trejo the next. As such, her professional fantasy is not necessarily the praise of Scorsese, but merely the industry’s price of admission: a full cinema, there just for her. When you extract the extraordinary from the American everyday, it’s the reaction of the ‘every man’ that means the most.

 “There's certainly people I admire and their opinion of my work would matter to me,” she concludes thoughtfully. “But I think I’d always imagine showing something to an audience… just a room full of people watching something I’ve made.”

 The world according to Nadia Lee Cohen. By Beatrice Hazlehurst. i-D, June 25, 2020

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April Dawn Alison : A Life in Polaroids

You know as much about her as I do. Her true and rightful name, or the name she left us with, is April Dawn Alison, and she was the photographic object of her own dreams. In her apartment, in Oakland, April became herself at the close of the day or at the start of it—who can say? The silence surrounding her pictures, or, shall I say, the silence regarding the maker of these photographs (all of which are untitled), is a layer on top of the layering this guy did in order to become himself: April, a gorgeous dream who came into real life in front of the camera. Every model is as good as the self or soul he or she or they are willing to project, and I’d bet money that putting on those shoes and wigs at the start of the day, or the close of it, allowed our guy becoming a woman to expose his soul to himself like nothing else on earth did or could do. April’s clothes are a form of self-love. She stretches her legs so that we can see their shapeliness in that red skirt, but where is she going?

Among the few facts we have about the man behind April: his name was Alan Schaefer; he was born in 1941, in the Bronx, and made a living as a commercial photographer. His neighbors and family didn’t know about April until after he died, in 2008. They never knew her to go to out in costuming; the party was her body, the dance hall was her apartment, and her dance partner was the camera. Imagine how long or filled with anticipation his days were as a commercial photographer, beautiful to himself as a she—and imagine, too, the moment he got home, closed the door, made a little dinner, and then got to work on being herself. All art is an exception to the rule—meaning, artists aren’t or shouldn’t be part of the status quo, which makes their lives difficult in a way that is different from the difficulties that affect folks who aren’t consumed by, or made different by, the experience of making. April was a maker, and so was the guy who made April; these pictures are a record of a double consciousness, the he who wants to be a she and the she who is a model and photographer both.

Who took the pictures, though? Him or her? I think both people, actually, and, if it’s not too simplistic to think, let alone say, I think he enjoyed looking at her. We see him and her both in the shots recorded on Polaroid, that medium of immediate sadness or gratification. I think April loved Polaroids as much as I do, and maybe for the same reason: we are both fascinated by the immediacy of them, of the image that reveals who you are, just moments after you’ve become it for the camera and in your mind’s eye. Polaroids also give you a chance to get it right—to get your self-image right, in better light or a better dress, without too much technical haggling with the camera. A Polaroid lets you know how your lighting is doing right away, and how to fix it or leave it alone. One gets the sense, looking at April’s beautifully composed photographs, not only that she worked hard to get it all right photographically but that she wanted to tell a story. Her “sexiness” and coyness and all of that seem fairly conventional to me, based perhaps on gentlemen’s magazines. But there were not that many other references for her to go by, and, after all, April was born a man. Did he have certain needs, such as loving a woman like April and cherishing her while having her live forever in an image? Your guess is as good as mine.

This text was drawn from “April Dawn Alison,” edited by Erin O’Toole, which is out in June from MACK.

The Hidden Identity in April Dawn Alison’s Self-Portraits. By Hilton Als. The New Yorker ,  June 2, 2019

When April Dawn Alison died aged 67 in San Francisco in 2008, no one knew who she was. Since the ’70s she’d been a recluse, appearing only after work and on weekends to take Polaroid self-portraits in her apartment, dressed up like movie stars, housewives and porn actors. Sometimes she looked goofy, sometimes sad, serious, or sexy, other times hauled-up in bondage gear, but she never strayed from where she lived. For years, April Dawn had harboured a secret: she’d been living a double life. During the day, she was called ‘Alan’, an ex-military commercial photographer. But at night she was someone else.

This June, a book named after April Dawn will, for the first time, collect some of the 9200 self-portraits she took over four decades, shedding light on her art and her life. Following her death, these images were sold by the manager of her estate (April Dawn was, allegedly, estranged from her family), and were eventually acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in 2017, which this July will exhibit them. Reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Polaroid selfies, in which the artist experimented with cross-dressing, the photos not only function as aesthetic and personal documents but bring to the fore the struggle of LGBTQ people to live openly in society, both then and now.

What is more, had it not been for a chance encounter, these images may still be languishing in obscurity. Having been contacted by a mutual acquaintance of the person who took possession of April Dawn’s archive two years ago, the book’s editor and SFMOMA curator, Erin O’Toole, immediately realised their value. She subsequently sought to contextualise these shots by publishing them alongside texts by New Yorker’s Hilton Als, and LGBTQ activist and producer of the trans comedy Transparent, Zackary Drucker. Tackling the ethics of posthumous publication as well as the artistic relevance of these images, O’Toole tells SLEEK why April Dawn’s story is worth telling.

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This is a very special collection. Have you worked on anything like this before?

No, it’s really unique. I’ve been at SFMOMA for 11 years, and I have never seen anything quite like it. I was blown away by a couple of things. One is that there are over 9000 pictures in the archive, and the other is that this was a project that April Dawn Alison was dedicated to for over 30 years.

How were you able to tell when April took them?

The pictures are undated, so I tried to determine how old they were through the style of the clothing. My best estimate is that she began circa 1970. We know that she passed away in 2008, so she stopped sometime before that.

How would you categorise these photos?

I think the best way to think about them is as a conceptual project. I’m not sure how she would have categorised it, but that’s how I see it. She’s created this fully realised self that she’s documented over the long term. One of the incredible things about it is that we witness her becoming more and more confident and assured as April Dawn over time. At the beginning, there are these very tentative attempts, but then she becomes more comfortable, more fluid. en in the middle period it becomes this incredibly joyous and energetic embrace of April Dawn.

Were you able to piece together an idea of who April was?

I know quite a bit about her public life as a man, but next to nothing about April Dawn. As far as I can tell, this was a private persona. I’ve spoken to relatives and friends, and none of them knew about her existence or these pictures. April Dawn was known to them as a man named ‘Alan “Al” Schaefer’, who was born in the Bronx, worked as a commercial photographer, and learned photography in the military.

How have you reconciled that, ethically, with publishing her photos in a book and an exhibition?

I’m very sensitive to the fact that this work was made for a private purpose and we don’t know if the artist would have wanted them shown. I think that showing the work is the right thing to do, however, because there’s currently a lot of tumult surrounding gender, identity and rights for LGBTQ people, and my hope is that this work will contribute positively to the conversation by providing visibility. I knew as soon as I began considering showing the pictures that I needed to engage the community about what it would mean to do so and to get advice about how I should talk about her given I know so little. I’ve had to consider the consequences of possibly posthumously outing someone as well as what it would mean to not show them. Ultimately, though, when I’ve shown this work to trans women, in particular, they’ve been very excited at the prospect of it being shown because visibility for people of non-normative gender identities is so critical to acceptance, and I’ve taken that seriously.

What was life like for the LGBTQ community in California during April’s lifetime?

Everyone knows that there’s long been a large and active LGBTQ community in the Bay Area. What I don’t know is whether or not April Dawn participated in it. My sense is that she didn’t. I’ve shown the pictures to a great many people who have tried to help me find others who might have known her and found no one, and after conversations with friends and family my feeling is that April Dawn was a private persona. Even today, it’s very di cult for trans people to be out in the world. It still isn’t safe, despite some improvements, and back in the Seventies it certainly wasn’t, so maybe she never felt safe to be April Dawn outside her apartment. I don’t know for sure.

Themes of gender and performance recur throughout the history of photography. Do you see April’s work responding to that?

I don’t know if she was responding to anything in particular, but I see parallels with the work of artists like Claude Cahun, Gillian Waring, Yasumasa Morimura and of course, Cindy Sherman.

Why, as a professional photographer, do you think she chose Polaroids?

There’s a long history of people taking private, often sexual, pictures with Polaroids because you don’t have to send them to a lab to be developed. It’s instant, and there’s something special about the quality of them. They’re these jewel-like objects and the colours are so beautiful and intense.

What connects these images? Obviously they all feature April, but there are so many different themes and poses.

I’d say there are two things. One is the sense of colour. When you see them together, the pictures are just this riot of colour. And then there’s the emotional quality. She’s bearing her soul to the camera. She’s not holding anything back. She’s putting herself out there. There’s no restraint. There’s just pure joy. Sadness. Humour.

Which are you favourite photos?

One of my favourites is one where she looks like Joan Crawford. It has a blue background and she’s leaning on the back of this white upholstered chair wearing a bright red sweater. There’s something very sweet about the way she lays her head on the edge of the chair. There’s also a series where you see her only from the waist down wearing a pencil skirt and red pumps. She’s wearing handcuffs and ankle cuffs, and she’s striking these bold poses. They look like a Seventies shoe ad by Guy Bourdin. I love those.

There are a few recurring poses, but the one that’s most striking is when she turns her back to the camera. What do you think the significance of these images is?

My first read on it was that she wanted to make sure her hair was right. But when I showed them to several trans women, they felt that they showed her how other people might see her in the world. Whether or not that’s what she was actually doing, I thought that was a very beautiful way of thinking about them. They are about seeing yourself from another person’s perspective.

April Dawn Alison ed. by Erin O’ Toole is available now from MACK. The exhibition of the same name will open on 6 July through to 1 December at SFMOMA.

Piecing together the secret history of LGBTQ artist April Dawn Alison in Polaroid.  To mark the publication of a book dedicated to the San Franciscan who took 9200 self-portraits over four decades, the title’s editor Erin O’Toole introduces the artist's work.

 Sleek  , June 11, 2019.

The many-layered female creation of a Californian photographer who lived in the world as a man became known only upon his death, when over 8,000 self-portraits—taken throughout a thirty-year period—were discovered. The remarkable collection documents the obsessive practice and performance of a non-public self. 

What is the first thing that you do when you get home? Do you throw your coat aside and pour yourself a drink? Perhaps you run a bath, get into your comfy clothes or heat up your dinner. The moment when the door closes firmly behind us marks the threshold between public and private, where our outward-facing self dissolves into our inner one. We each occupy multiple identities on a daily basis, switching between them at work, at play and at rest.

For April Dawn Alison, the female persona of a California-based photographer who lived in the world as a man, this transition between exterior and interior, and between public and private, was more sharply defined. In self-portraits taken over a thirty-year period, April reveals herself in the seclusion of her home, posing for the camera amidst the domestic setting of a cluttered kitchen, a carpeted living room or an ordinary hallway. Within these four walls, April Dawn Alison is born.

Who is she, this glamorous woman in the high-heeled shoes, with a glimmer of a smile turning up the edge of her eyes? Cheeky tongue stuck out in more than one shot, legs spread unapologetically wide to reveal big white pants in others. April is the many-layered creation of Alan Schaefer, born in the Bronx in 1941, who worked during the day as a commercial photographer, loved playing tennis and was a voracious listener of jazz. None of his friends or family knew of Schaefer’s private life as April Dawn Alison until his death at the age of sixty-seven in 2008. April was a personal project, a life lived out-of-view in the privacy of the home.

Over 8,000 Polaroid pictures were found following Schaefer’s death. Saved by a house clearance team curious about the images, they were sold to a local Oakland-based artist who later donated the collection to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The remarkable collection documents the obsessive practice and performance of a non-public self. We can never know if the archive was intended to be discovered, and its posthumous emergence means that there are so many unanswered questions. Who was April, really, and what kind of tea did she like to drink? How well did the man truly know the woman?

The camera was her stage, the click of the shutter her cue. She is serious about her drag, with bouffant wigs, pussy bow blouses and a full face of makeup. She is funny, too, posing playfully with the hoover out or a set of pastel-coloured balloons. As Erin O’Toole, curator at SFMOMA reflects, “Marked by a manic exuberance and a kaleidoscopic array of outfits and scenarios, April Dawn Alison’s self-portraits reveal a rich inner life filled with as much humour as pathos, as much joy as loneliness. In them she embodies a wide range of feminine archetypes drawn from advertising, motion pictures, and pornography.”

It is difficult to imagine what April might feel about the prospect of these images being shown in a public forum, and specifically in the context of the arts. An exhibition at SFMOMA (set to open this July) and a new book published by MACK (featuring essays by O’Toole, cultural critic Hilton Als and Zachary Drucker, star of the television show Transparent), bring many of the portraits together publicly for the first time. For a project so intensely private to be made public feels both shocking and revelatory when brought into the light. Moreover, in an age of oversharing and instant gratification, a thirty-year project intended only for private consumption and personal pleasure feels so anachronistic and so genuine as to become almost sacred.

Today, the right for trans people to exist in the world without fear of discrimination or violence remains under threat, even as renewed visibility has allowed for wider conversation on these issues in the mainstream media and beyond. April Dawn Alison did not exist outside of her Oakland apartment, and was invisible to all but herself and her camera. Hers was a deeply internalized way of being, and one can’t help but wonder how she might have experienced the world had she felt compelled and safe to step beyond the threshold of her own home. Instead, photography became her act of both defiance and self-preservation, revealing as much vulnerability as pride. Together, her self-portraits carve out room for the gender fluidity that society and its rigid binaries so rarely make space for.  

April Dawn Alison Casts Light On the Identities That We Hide Away. By  Louise Benson.  Elephant, June 9, 2019. 

For this year’s photo issue we were thrilled to be able to include images from the recently released book April Dawn Alison. Beginning in the 70s and spanning 30 years, the series of self-portraits captures the many looks of April Dawn Alison, the feminine persona of a California-based photographer who lived in the world as a man.

The book, published by MACK this month, features essays by writer and critic Hilton Als, artist and television producer Zackery Drucker, and Erin O’Toole, an associate curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As O’Toole explains, Alison’s photos “reveal a rich inner life filled with as much humor as pathos, as much joy as loneliness. In them she embodies a wide range of female types drawn from advertising, motion pictures, and pornography. She moves effortlessly from Hollywood screen sirens in tight sweaters to frumpy aunties in high-necked blouses, from pin-up models in string bikinis to dishwashing housewives in rubber gloves, from efficient French maids in starched white aprons to docile BDSM submissives in bras and panties.”

Intimate Photos Capture a Photographer's Feminine Persona. Vice ,  June 3 , 2019.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

John Berger: ‘If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen’

The writer and art critic John Berger passed away on Monday the second of January. His trilogy Into their Labours, Pig Earth (1980), Once in Europe (1987) and Lilac and Flag (1990) moved me. A trilogy of novels that traces the journey of the European peasant from the mountains to the metropolis. The Dutch translations by Sjaak Commandeur were published by De Bezige Bij between 1988-1990.
                                                                             

                                                                      

“The way I observe comes naturally to me as a curious person – I’m like la vigie – the lookout guy on a boat who does small jobs, maybe such as shovelling stuff into a boiler, but I’m no navigator – absolutely the opposite. I wander around the boat, find odd places – the masts, the gunwale – and then simply look out at the ocean. Being aware of travelling has nothing to do with being a navigator.”

In his 1975 book A Seventh Man, about migration, the rescuing impulse is clear. Berger writes in the preface: “To outline the experience of the migrant worker and to relate this to what surrounds him – both physically and historically – is to grasp more surely the political reality of the world at this moment. The subject is European, its meaning is global. Its theme is unfreedom.” When he considers today’s refugee crisis – no longer confined to Europe – does he see the first world as suffering from a failure of imagination? There is another extended pause, like a ravine into which one might fall. Eventually he replies: “What two different people have in common will always, in all cases, be larger than what differentiates them. And yet for dozens of different reasons, circumstances blind people to that.”

But Berger’s greatest strength in old age is his ability to live in the present. “I cultivated this early on – and this is the paradox – because it was an escape from prescriptions, prophecies, consequences and causes.” The present moment is key to his thinking too. In Ways of Seeing, he suggests that paintings embody the present in which they were painted. Defining the secret of reading aloud well, he says it is “refusing to look ahead, to be in the moment”. And he says that a story puts its listener “in an eternal present”. He has also written about the circularity of time. Does he think that applies to an individual life? Is there, in old age, a way in which one starts to hold hands with one’s younger self?

The Guardian 

Some interesting video's here,  in particular his talk with Susan Sontag from 1983: To tell a story.  

Hyperallergic 

“A woman is always accompanied, except when quite alone, and perhaps even then, by her own image of herself. While she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her father, she cannot avoid envisioning herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does, because how she appears to others – and particularly how she appears to men – is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”

Berger’s  analysis of the female figure in art and advertising.

Dazed