Intimate photos of trans women in Cuba

In some ways, to take photographs is to study moments; it is to be preoccupied with glances, with lighting, with things that transpire in a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a second.

For 35 years, Allen had taken pictures of transgender people and communities in the United States, watching a movement unfold from something quiet, something kept close, to something loud, something shouting for visibility.

The photographs are collected in a book called “TransCuba,” and some of them are on display through July at RayKo Photo Center (along with two other series, by two other photographers, exploring queer themes).

[...] as the U.S. moves to normalize relations with Cuba, the photographs take on new relevance.

“There are some terrible stories in the book, terrible things happening to people,” Allen says.

Allen doesn’t quite remember if she was staying in a hotel or a motel at the time (not that it really matters), but she knows she was alone when she came down to breakfast.

“I saw this incredible group of people — fascinating-looking people, done up to the nines, and here it was morning,” Allen says.

Afterward, the group of cross-dressers (that’s the word they used to describe themselves then, the same year that Harvey Milk was sworn in as a San Francisco supervisor and months later assassinated) got up and walked to the swimming pool.

Aside from “TransCuba,” Allen has published two other collections of photography focusing on transgender lives, one in 1990 and one in 2004, assembling a visual history as it actually happened.

In “TransCuba,” there are moments of repose and intimacy, of a family sitting together, of a couple sharing a tender kiss on a warm beach, of a woman blowing on another’s drying fake eyelashes.

In many of the photographs, the subjects meet the camera head-on, an old, unspoken gesture that says something like, “We are here.”

Front and (almost) center is a young man getting his hair cut, but around him, you can find a sort of timeline — artifacts of the past (a poster of Fidel Castro) and signs of now (a man wearing a Playboy tank top).

The conference that brought Allen to Cuba was put together by a group that provides medical and psychological services to transgender and gay people — a group that’s headed by Mariela Castro Espín, the daughter of Cuban leader Raúl Castro.

Transgender surgeries are now covered by the state, there are days marked to fight and march against trans-phobia and homophobia, and a few years back, a trans woman was elected to public office for the first time.

“The revolution in 1959 was supposed to be for everybody, but not everyone benefited from it; homosexuals were excluded,” Malu, one of the women at the heart of the series, says in the transcripts at the back for the book.

All of Allen’s books include transcripts of interviews with the subjects, and in the case of “TransCuba,” they appear both in English and Spanish.