“Growing up, I didn’t think about my family being extraordinary,” says the British artist and photographer Sara Davidmann. “But if I was to take myself out of the picture and to look at my family from the outside, it’s quite fascinating.” She first mentions her father, Manfred, a German-Jewish refugee who escaped Berlin for the U.K. via the Kindertransport. In Edinburgh, he met Davidmann’s mother, Audrey, an avid diarist and chronicler. (Later in life, she’d pin a tag to a particular cardigan in her closet as an “aide-mémoire”: It was, she wrote, “still wearable, but only open, over a dress.”) Her parents and Audrey’s sister, Hazel, account for three of the characters in Davidmann’s ongoing photo-based project, “Ken. To be destroyed.” The fourth player is Ken, Hazel’s husband and Davidmann’s uncle, an ophthalmic optician and ballroom dancer who came out as transgender in Scotland in the 1950s.

Davidmann remembers that her mother told her about Ken in 2005, when she’d partially completed a practice-based Ph.D. in collaborative photography with transgender people at London College of Communication. “She said that I was to keep it a secret, and I said that I wouldn’t, because I didn’t think that was the right thing to do,” Davidmann says. She discussed it among her friends, “but at that time, it didn’t occur to me to produce a project — there wasn’t really a reason to do so.” In 2011, however, while preparing Audrey’s longtime home to be sold, Davidmann and her brother found a pair of large envelopes marked “Ken’s letters to Hazel. To be destroyed” and “Ken. To be destroyed,” and a brown bag labeled “Letters from Hazel re Ken” inside a chest of drawers in the garage.

“We both knew instantly what they would be about,” Davidmann says. The bulk of the collection consisted of letters between Hazel and Audrey, once Hazel learned of Ken’s transgenderism, but she also came across Hazel and Ken’s initial correspondence (they were pen pals before they ever met); Ken’s inquiries to medical professionals, records of him taking estrogen, an application to the transgender support group Beaumont Society and his impressions on Harry Benjamin’s 1966 book, “The Transsexual Phenomenon”; and scraps of paper from Manfred that Audrey would put into writing to send to Hazel. Davidmann had the sense that “everybody was trying to understand and support each other. There was no blame being placed, and that was one of the things that really struck me.” Ken and Hazel stayed together until his death in 1979.