Unlikely Allies: Middle Aged Photographers and the Trans Camera

This paper takes up the parallel lives of two Jewish middle-aged women photographers, one in Italy, the other in Brazil, and the role of their photographs of the Genoa and Sao Paolo trans scenes for the way they presaged the visibility politics of the gay, lesbian, and feminist social movements of the 1970s and 80s. Lisetta Carmi and Madalena Schwartz, refugees who fled the Nazis in the 1930s before working their way into photography late in life, built relationships of intimacy and trust with the sex workers and performers they photographed in Italy and Brazil. In the process, they created a new visual language and emotional register for how to think about gender non-conformism long before Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Goldin turned the camera on their own worlds. Working in the shadow of neo fascism in Italy and dictatorship in Brazil, stories of kinship like these ask us to rethink the history of the Sexual Revolution as centered in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam and West Berlin. They unveil new points of contact, new sources of trust and allyship, and new visual and emotional regimes of ethnography and truth telling. Most compellingly, they cast light on new and different actors - on both sides of the lens - whose stories have been undervalued or perhaps never even told.