A girlfriend of mine once attended a drag-king workshop. I saw the photographs: her pasted-on moustache and sideburns, her breast-bindings, her plaid shirt, the prosthetic bulge in her leather trousers. “Seeing myself as a man,” she said, “made me realise how constructed my femininity was.” Her mother went, too. It was play but more than play. When I wear a skirt or paint my nails, it signifies resistance to a normative masculinity I have never wanted. It attests to something beyond the binary. What a performance gender is.

There is an urgency to the 200 or so images in Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers, which has just opened at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. These amateur images, taken between the 1880s and the 1980s, belong to the French director Sébastien Lifshitz, who put the collection together after making Wild Side (2001), a film about the life of a transsexual woman.



Man dressed as a woman, Mannheim, Germany, c.1960; right, burlesque comedian Crun-Crun in Avignon, France, 1900. Composite: Courtesy of Sebastien Lifshitz and The Photographers’ Gallery

“My classification was extremely simplistic,” Lifshitz wrote when the exhibition opened in Arles in 2016. “All individuals wearing the other gender’s clothes were put in the same box. I would later discover that things were much more complex than that.”



One is certainly struck by the insufficiency of two genders. There is also the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of reading motives, because these images go beyond mere dressing up. They are to do with the self-creation of identity. Even at its most playful, this constitutes a stepping away from what one has been given. Today, the terminology proliferates in ways that would have been unimaginable to the subjects here. An entire spectrum of human possibilities, however, is implicit among these images of male and female transvestites, trans men and women, the cisgendered and the genderqueer, straights, gays, lesbians, the pan-gendered, the gender-fluid and the gender-neutral.



A housemaid and a young man – maybe a lad on an errand – flirt before a vase of flowers. Both are women. So, too, is the bloke loitering with cigarette and walking cane in the park. The steps and urns behind him are a studio backdrop. Four other women pose as soldiers and their floozies. Another pair, both men, pose for a double portrait, looking like a pair of young women out for a walk in the country. They’re Frenchmen in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany in 1915. What is the story here? Why are they looking so serious? For all their everyday manners, their heads leaning together in this small oval keepsake, how vertiginous and unknowable the image becomes.



Indeed, while many of the photographs are celebratory, we can rarely glean what motivated any of the subjects, except to say they all find themselves in conflict with the norms, expectations and laws of their time. It may be play acting, entertainment, a temporary escape, a desire to put oneself in the place of the “other” – men as women, women as men, or somewhere less defined.

‘Taken at stag given by Fillie & Amanda’ reads the caption on this group of women in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1912. Photograph: courtesy Sebastien Lifshitz/the Photographers’ Gallery

I look for a tell – a male jawline, an Adam’s apple, footwear – as if every image and every encounter were a puzzle. “Are you a girl,” the (usually malicious) question goes, “or are you a boy?” Yes is the best answer, redoubling the conundrum and offering it back to the questioner. And what is it, exactly, that one wants to know? Some people, I think, are troubled by ambiguities, by indeterminacies and uncertainty. But which is the authentic, which the guise? All clothes are costume and a kind of drag – a social marker, a fixing of class, status, role and gender.

There is a great deal of humour and pleasure in the images, which are mostly from France, Germany and the US. In 1912, a group of students at an all-female American college get rigged up in the conventional male clothes of the day (there weren’t many choices, male attire being drearily limited), with hats, cigars and waistcoats. There is also threat and danger. A bevy of young men in matching skirts and skimpy tops pose for a souvenir of their night out. An androgynous figure in evening dress, like a cabaret compere, stands at their centre. We are in Germany. It is 1937. Who were these people and whatever happened to them? There is a strain to the smiles and laughs. I look at an image of happiness and I see the void.

Man in makeup, 1920 … a colour highlighted picture from a photo booth, United States, c.1920. Photograph: courtesy Sebastien Lifshitz/the Photographers’ Gallery

The ambiguities redouble the more one looks. Devoid of backstory, the images dare you to look at them, and the people in them look back with a mixture of self-consciousness and confidence – or they look elsewhere, pensive, as if caught unawares. Performing for themselves, for each other and for the camera, their roles are frequently stereotypical of their times. Some photos are souvenirs of dressing-up parties. Others are in the style of movie pin-ups, cabaret posters, or hand coloured postcard vignettes from the theatrical revue.

The camera affirms that these people exist, with their parasols and fabulous hats, at a transvestite hotel, wearing their 1950s industrial-strength lipstick. Alone at home or out on the porch, in their terrific and not so terrific makeup, all of them are just trying to be in the world. Whether convincing or unconvincing, they are almost always touching, astonishing, tender, melancholy, vulnerable and haughty.

Some images are undoubtedly selfies, taken with a timer, while in others we imagine the photographer in the room or the studio, out by the barn or in some other outdoor setting, recording the acting out of the stories of these alternative lives. Some images have a real sense of necessity, an authenticity that needed to be claimed and marked.

Looking at these amateur images (although the word amateur does not always seem quite right), we become implicated as soon as we begin to imagine their stories. These photographs celebrate lives and desires, possibilities and necessities. The images were made to be looked at, we imagine, by their subjects, giving their self images a greater validation, affirmation and confirmation than the mirror alone can provide. The photograph is a mediation between the self and the world, as symbolic as it is a record of a moment and a state of being.

‘This is my friend Jess Yelton + I. Don’t we look like the opposite sex?’ … a US card photo, c.1930. Photograph: courtesy Sebastien Lifshitz/the Photographers’ Gallery

Many of these are very ordinary portraits and group shots, the kind you’d pass over in a family album until you look more closely. Take the shots of what seems to be a woman in later middle age, posing in each room of her house in Florida, wearing a different outfit for each setting. We see her standing beside a sideboard decorated for Christmas; we see her in her kitchen, still in her coat and just back from shopping; we see her in front of the sofa, as if she’s risen to greet a guest, the viewer of the photograph.

How unremarkable these pictures are, until we realise how precise they are in their studied ordinariness. Even the captions – The new sweater I made; My new sewing machine and cabinet;, Just got home from church with new yellow shirt – attest to a conventional life. She is recording herself, doing what ordinary women do. Is there a difference between posing and being? Convention, with all its trappings, is just another kind of performance.