Vice.com has a great piece on a collection of photos from Halrem’s 1980’s drag scene.
The photographs were taken in 1984 by Mariette Pathy Allen who traveled to Harlem to photograph one night at a house ball.
By 1984, Mariette was married with two children, doing small photography jobs for publications while also documenting the transgender community that would later become the center of her groundbreaking first book, Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them, published in 1989. While studying at Columbia University, her husband became friends with a man named Ivan, who was connected with people in the Harlem House Ballroom scene. Mariette received an invitation and decided to go, creating a collection of magical portraits from one night at the ball.
“The ball officially began at midnight and ran until eight in the morning,” Mariette says. “I arrived around 10 to photograph people getting ready. It began around 12:30, and there was an announcer introducing the categories like Face, Body, and Femme Queen Realness. Everyone looked amazing, so beautiful and young. They worked to put their costumes together, and everything was so precise. Even though it was a competition, there wasn’t any kind of meanness or fighting. It was a supportive environment. This was a happy occasion, where people were proud and presenting themselves at their best.”
The sense of community can be seen in Mariette’s photos, which capture both competitors and audience members at a time when few were documenting the scene.
“I have always been respectful to the people I photograph whether I speak to them or not,” Mariette says. “I’ve always been careful that people were aware that I was taking their picture and that they were comfortable with the idea. I was an outsider because I’m not trans, but I understand from a deeply personal level what it means to wonder who you are and to feel that you have to adopt certain roles as a man or a woman. Who made that up?”
See the full article, here.