Photographer Mark Seliger , best known for his portraits of high-powered people such as Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, and Mick Jagger, was taking pictures backstage at a late-night cabaret in Cuba a dozen or so years ago. The scene reminded him of the everyday pageantry he’d experienced near his West Village loft in lower Manhattan. “I was thinking, ‘Wow.
Our neighborhood’s changed so much,’” Seliger said in a recent Zoom interview from that loft. “One of the things I haven’t seen in a while is the wonderful theatricality on Christopher Street. I thought maybe I’d go out and I would see if that still exists.
” In 2013, he set to spending his off-hours prowling the street, photographing people. “I put these portraits together, pinned them on the wall,” said the artist, a cisgender man. “And one of the people in our studio came back and said, ‘Oh, are you doing a book on trans people?’” Advertisement He realized he was.
“This is almost an Ellis Island for blurring gender lines,” Seliger said of his neighborhood. “It dawned on me that there was a very deep story here.” “On Christopher Street: Transgender Portraits by Mark Seliger” is on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through Sept.
8. The show, which features photographs from Seliger’s book published by Rizzoli in 2016, was organized by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Christopher Street, the oldest street in Greenwich Village, has been a center of LGBTQ life for decades.
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