April Dawn Alison

April Dawn Alison

April Dawn Alison, Erin O'Toole • MACK

This edition of April Dawn Alison

ISBN-10: 1573740578 · ISBN-13: 978‑1912339433 · 2019 · 1st Edition

Canonical book record

Completeness 43

Cover quality: good

2manybooks editorial

Made over the course of some thirty years, the photographs in this book depict the many faces of April Dawn Alison, the female persona of an Oakland, California based photographer who lived in the world as a man. This previously unseen body of self-portraits, which was given to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2017, begins tentatively in 1970s in black-and-white, and evolves in the 80s into an exuberant, wildly colourful, 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 Amazon series Transparent) and Erin O’Toole (associate curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

Book metadata

Contributors

Community tags

Inferred themes

Machine-inferred from catalog text. Not verified subjects.

Stored catalog notes

Community signals

Have: 13 · Like: 2 · Rating: 3.9 / 5 (12)