#mariettepathyallen

[talkingpictures2020]

Photographers: On Beauty

What is Beauty? What does it mean when we call something beautiful?

In this final post for 2024, TALKING PICTURES presents twelve personal reflections on beauty by acclaimed contemporary photographers from around the world. Their insights, and the images they have selected to illustrate their ideas, are as richly diverse as are their individual creative practices.

Roger Ballen (South Africa); Rona Bar & Ofek Avshalom, aka Fotometro (United Kingdom); Ciro Battiloro (Italy); Judith Nangala Crispin (Australia); Maika Elan (Vietnam); Luis Gonzalez Palma (Guatemala); Lin Zhipeng / No. 223 (China); Cecilia Paredes (Peru); Mariette Pathy Allen (USA); William Ropp (France); Tomoko Sawada (Japan); and Danielle van Zadelhoff (Belgium).

IMAGE: © Tomoko Sawada ‘TIARA’ [detail] 2008 (courtesy of ROSEGALLERY)

Wishing all our readers a beautiful 2025, however you define it!

*** Please note that Talking Pictures has a new URL: www.talking-pictures.online ***

[harvard-art-museums-photography]

Sherry, Mariette Pathy Allen, 1980s, Harvard Art Museums: Photographs

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Gift of the artist © Mariette Pathy Allen Size: 58.4 x 39.4 cm (23 x 15 1/2 in.)

https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/160385

[jacaldwellphoto]

as always a pretty fun but definitely some hard emotional moments at the museum of sex today with @misspropane especially the #mariettepathyallen stuff very relevant this week for sure (at Museum of Sex) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv5QN8wF6F2/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=d39lu34d3ri5

[coupermatthew]

@jorussphoto with #mariettepathyallen at #spe2016 #redrockcasino #lasvegas (at Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa)

[sugarcanemagazine]

At @yeelengallery Drying eyelashes, backseat the National Theatre, Havana . Image by #mariettepathyallen art #Cuba #havana #gallery #blackownedbusiness

[talkingpictures2020]

Mariette Pathy Allen Chronicles of Gender Diversity

Today, gender is increasingly understood as a construct open to the interpretation of the individual. A Pantone of possibility rather than a brick-block binary. Such openness is a relatively new state of affairs. Not so long ago, exploring and expressing one’s non-binary psyche was something that must be kept totally hidden or run the risk of public ridicule, ostracism, and physical abuse.

It was in the context of this necessarily secretive world of non-conformist gender expression that the photographer Mariette Pathy Allen first became aware of men who dressed as women. It was to change the direction of her artmaking and, equally, to change the way male-to-female crossdressers were represented in the USA. Over the years she became an unofficial chronicler of the transgender and non-binary community and an activist ally. Her approach has remained constant: the caring and sensitive representation of all gender-diverse identities as part of a human continuum to which we all belong. A triumph of self-actualisation over simplistic convention.

Mariette Pathy Allen discusses her remarkable chronicle of gender diversity at Talking Pictures.