April Dawn Alison

April Dawn Alison
April Dawn Alison

Photographs: April Dawn Alison

Text: Hilton Als, Zachary Drucker, Erin O'Toole

Publisher: MACK

220 pages

Year: 2019

ISBN: 9781912339433

Comments: Hardcover, 28,5 x 23 cm, color polaroids, a few black and white. First edition. In very good condition.

April Dawn Alison was the private feminine persona of a photographer known to family, friends, and neighbors as a man named Alan (Al) Schaefer (1941-2008), who lived and worked in Oakland, California.

The photographs were made over the course of more than thirty years, and discovered upon the artist’s death. These extraordinary pictures — virtually all of them self-portraits — explore a wide range of feminine archetypes drawn from advertising, motion pictures, and fetish and pornographic imagery, revealing a rich inner life filled with as much humor as pathos, as much joy as loneliness. Together they constitute an intimate personal archive documenting a fully realized self, unseen by others. Posed in the safety of her home, Alison presents herself in her full beauty and humanity in a way she may not have felt free to do in the world.