Remarkable photographs of remote retreat in New York’s Catskill mountains are to go on display at the Barbican in London

During the week they were male accountants, librarians, people living ordinary lives in drab grey suits, white shirts, ties and not attracting a second glance. Come the weekend they were fashionably dressed women playing bridge, drinking cocktails, posing for photographs and still looking ordinary. But also joyously happy.

Remarkable photographs from a remote 1950s and 1960s cross-dressing retreat in the Catskill mountains of New York state are to go on display for the first time in the UK. They document a secret community that could have fallen through the gaps of history had a box of photographs not been discovered at a New York flea market in 2006.

More than 100 images from the retreat, called Casa Susanna, will go on display, part of a wider exhibition at the Barbican art gallery in London exploring the relationship between photographers and alternative communities.

“Casa Susanna was a place of refuge where they could be utterly free and away from prying eyes,” said the curator, Alona Pardo. “These people in their everyday lives could not walk around New York City as cross-dressers. This was a place where they had fun.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Image from the Casa Susanna collection. Photograph: Art Gallery of Ontario

The cross-dressing resort was created and run by Tito Valenti, a court translator, and his wife Marie, a New York wigmaker. There were two locations, the first called Chevalier d’Eon – after the 18th-century spy and transvestite – set up in the mid-50s and the second, Casa Susanna, after Valenti’s preferred first name, from 1964-69.

With its 150 acres of land, big house and lake for swimming, Casa Susanna was the perfect place for the men to express their femininity, to be who they wanted without reproach or judgment.

Pardo said the photographs were mostly very ordinary, showing them playing cards, dancing, eating, drinking and chatting. But that is part of their power. They were constantly taking photographs of each other as an affirmation of who they were.

Apart from the photographs, details are fairly scant about Casa Susanna and the people who made the weekend trips. Many of the men were heterosexual and married to women and the retreat has been called a kind of finishing school, a place where Manhattan businessmen could improve their makeup and deportment skills as well as have fun and make friends.

Some of the photographs show women who have glammed up, deliberately vamping for the camera. Others are decidedly more middle America housewife.

One of the attendees was Virginia Prince, who founded a magazine called Transvestia, for which Valenti wrote an advice column.



The photographs were discovered by chance more than a decade ago by Robert Swope, a regular at a flea market on 26th Street in Manhattan. He immediately recognised what he had, said Pardo, and published a selection of the images in a 2005 book.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest More than 100 images from the retreat will go on display. Photograph: Art Gallery of Ontario

In 2015 they were purchased by the Art Gallery of Ontario, which recognised them as a rare early example of photography used to explore gender identity – “tender fragments of queer lives lived,” according to the AGO curator Sophie Hackett. The 341 photographs are now part of its permanent collection.

The Barbican exhibition will include photographers who have not only photographed, but have actively engaged with the subjects they are capturing. Final details of the 2018 show are still being worked on but Pardo said the exhibition would include images of yakuza criminals in Tokyo, child homelessness in Seattle and male sex workers in Pinochet’s Chile.

“What unites all of these bodies of work is how the photographers transgress the insider-outsider relationship. These are all artists who have sustained engagement with the communities or the individuals they have gone on to reveal to us.”

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There are no British subjects in the show simply because they have not found suitable examples although there is still time, said Pardo.

The photography show is one of a number of events for the Barbican’s 2018 season, The Art of Change, which will explore the dialogue between art, society and politics.

Other events will include a recreation by Jazz at Lincoln Center of a Benny Goodman concert from 1938, the first interracial concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall, considered a watershed moment in American musical history.

The avant-garde theatre group The Wooster Company is also bringing its play The Town Hall Affair to the UK for the first time, documenting a raucous 1971 debate on women’s liberation that saw Germaine Greer and others clashing with the sexist Norman Mailer.

There will also be a new experimental strand for rapid response reactions to world events, advertised no more than seven days in advance.

Louise Jeffreys, the director of arts at the Barbican, said the idea for the season emerged from discussions about the approaching centenary of women’s suffrage. “After a while it evolved in to a discussion about ‘what does it take to be an active citizen’,” she said.

“It is quite easy at the moment, isn’t it, to get a bit pulled down by the news. But people, no matter how small or micro, can make change. We certainly don’t want people to think: ‘Oh it’s all so bleak and terrible, there’s nothing we can do.’”

• Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins will be at the Barbican Art Gallery 28 February to 27 May 2018



