April Dawn Alison

Taken over the course of thirty years, the photographs in this book represent the many faces of April Dawn Alison, the female character from an Oakland, California-based photographer who has lived around the world as than man. This body of unpublished self-portraits, which was donated to the Museum of Art modern San Francisco in 2017, tentatively begins in the 1970s in black and white and evolved in the 80s into an exuberant practice, wildly colorful and haunting inspired by depictions of women in Classic Cinema, BDSM Pornography and Advertising. An Exploration singular and long-term of a non-public self, the archives contain photographs that are beautiful, hilarious, enigmatic and sad heartbreaking, sometimes all at once. With essays by Hilton Als (writer and American theater critic for The New Yorker), Zackary Drucker (artist American transgender multimedia, LGBT activist, actress and producer of Smash Amazon series Transparent) and Erin O'Toole (associate curator of the photograph at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).