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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
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