Description:

Unlikely Allies: Jewish Middle Aged Photographers and the Trans Camera

Annual Spring Theodore “Zev” Weiss Lecture in Holocaust Studies featuring Jennifer V. Evans (Carleton University) 

This lecture 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 trans 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, these stories of kinship and solidarity ask us to consider the connections between the afterlives of the Holocaust and the Sexual Revolution

Open to the Public | Reception to Follow