April Dawn Alison gathers three decades of self-portraits by the Oakland, California-based photographer April Dawn Alison, who lived in the world as a man while developing a female persona outside public view. Made from the 1970s onward, the photographs trace an intimate, sustained practice of self-fashioning rather than a single period or project.

The sequence begins tentatively in black and white before moving, in the 1980s, toward exuberant colour and a more obsessive visual language. Alison draws on images of women in classic cinema, BDSM pornography and advertising, transforming these public codes into a private theatre of identity, desire and performance. The resulting pictures can be beautiful, funny, enigmatic and deeply sad—often within the same frame or adjoining images. Their force lies in this refusal of a single emotional register.

The book presents a previously unseen body of work given to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2017. Its importance is therefore both artistic and historical: it makes accessible an extended photographic archive in which identity is explored through repetition, disguise, fantasy and the camera’s own capacity for invention. Rather than reducing the photographs to documentary evidence, the collection preserves their ambiguity and the tension between constructed image and lived experience.

Published by MACK in 2019, the 220-page hardback includes essays by Hilton Als, Zackary Drucker and Erin O’Toole, whose contributions situate the photographs within wider conversations around gender, representation and photographic practice. For collectors, the book offers a substantial encounter with a singular long-term archive, distinguished by its evolving colour, its emotional range and the coherence of a vision sustained over some thirty years.