April Dawn Alison

Edited by Erin O’Toole

Made over the course of some thirty years, the photographs in this book depict the many faces of April Dawn Alison, the female persona of an Oakland, California based photographer who lived in the world as a man. This previously unseen body of self-portraits, which was given to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2017, begins tentatively in the 1970s in black-and-white and evolves in the 80s into an exuberant, wildly colorful, and obsessive practice inspired by representations of women in classic film, BDSM pornography, and advertising.

With essays by Hilton Als (Critic for The New Yorker), Zackary Drucker (Transgender artist, LGBT activist, actress, and producer of Amazon series Transparent) and Erin O’Toole (associate curator of photography at the SFMOMA).

Hardback, 220 pages, 2019.

9.5 x 11 in.