Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them, made by U.S. photographer Mariette Pathy Allen from 1978 through the 1980s, beginning in New Orleans and extending across the United States, portrays crossdressers with spouses, children, relatives, and friends.
The project grew from Allen's chance encounter with a group of crossdressers during Mardi Gras in 1978. Through Vicky West, whom she met there, Allen entered wider social networks and later photographed gatherings such as Fantasia Fair in Provincetown. At a time when gender-variant people were often closeted and publicly depicted through pornography or pathologizing scientific contexts, she sought to show participants in what she called "the daylight of everyday life." Through photographs and interviews, the project examines gender expression, visibility, and social recognition while distinguishing identity and presentation from anatomy and sexual orientation. Its attention to marriage, parenting, friendship, work, religion, and community places individual self-expression within negotiated relationships.
That relational emphasis shapes a visual language combining environmental documentation with directed portraiture. Predominantly black-and-white photographs show domestic transformations, family interactions, church attendance, clubs, beaches, dunes, and community gatherings. A child watches her father become Paula, Vicky West dances with Allen's daughters, and Sheila cries in church. A separate color sequence concentrates on posed figures, clothing, wigs, makeup, fur, and self-fashioned glamour. Allen collaborated with sitters on movement, bodily position, setting, and the femininity they wished to project, allowing observed social life and constructed self-presentation to coexist.
Working with 35 mm cameras, color slide film, and black-and-white negative film, she often photographed in both before deciding which version to use. The monochrome images circulated as gelatin-silver prints, while eleven color portraits were later brought together as a dye-transfer portfolio accompanying the book.
After approaches to nearly fifty publishers, E. P. Dutton released the 160-page book in 1989, combining 32 personal profiles with 100 black-and-white photographs and a sixteen-page color section. The portfolio debuted at Simon Lowinsky Gallery in New York in January 1990. Later presentations included Provincetown Arts Association, Harvard's Carpenter Center, Vassar College, CLAMP, and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts. MoMA holds the complete portfolio, while the National Gallery of Art holds Madeline Victoria.
