Background information
"Made over the course of some thirty years, the photographs in hte photo volume 'Alison' by April DAWN and Erin O'Toole (ed.) depict the many faces of Alison, the female persona of an Oakland, California based photographer who lived in the world as a man.
Content
This previously unseen body of self-portraits, which was given to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2017, begins tentatively in 1970s black-and-white, and evolves in the 1980s into an exuberant, wildly colorful, and obsessive practice inspired by representations of women in classic film, BDSM pornography and advertising. A singular, long-term exploration of a non-public self, the archive contains photographs that are beautiful, hilarious, enigmatic, and heartbreakingly sad, sometimes all at once.
With essays by Hilton Als (American writer and theater critic for The New Yorker), Zackary Drucker (American transgender multimedia artist, LGBT activist, actress and producer of smash Netflix series Transparent) and Erin O’Toole (associate curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)." (publisher's note, © Mack books, 2019)
In the press
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"Intriguing" (© Art in America)
"There’s a voyeuristic pleasure in [...] revelling in the pathos, the playfulness, the vulnerability." (© Artnet)
"Joy and melancholy coexist in her pictures" (© Bookforum)
About the author and curator, Erin O'TOOLE
- Ed(s)/Author(s)
- Hilton Erin O'Toole, Hilton Als, Zackary Drucker
- Format
- Vinyl covered HC, 24 x 27,5 cm., 220 pp., b/w & color ills., text language: English