If you’ve ever been to New York you might have happened upon the legendary meatpacking district. It’s a haven for high end designer shops like Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen but it's also home to – unsurprisingly, meat warehouses. It’s a beautiful juxtaposition, in a way that New York does so well. Photographer Katsu Naito has been capturing the glamour of some rather special meatpacking regulars, in a new show and book entitled West Side Rendezvous. A collection of 45 black and white portraits of the meatpacking district’s transvestite and transsexual street walkers.
I don't often see the words transvestite, transsexual, street walker and meatpacking in the same sentence, and to be honest, that's a shame. These words, however, don’t really do the West Side Rendezvous show justice, because it’s much more than the sum of its parts. While it may sound sensational, exploitative or even trashy, it is in fact none of those things. There’s an obvious connection of friendship and trust between photographer and subject in the images. The models pose, smiling, laughing, full of brashness and over the top performance. But there’s a rare picture, here and there, where the model looks fragile and damaged, where it’s almost too much to look into their eyes.
The photographs in Katsu Naito’s West Side Rendezvous date from the 1990’s although there’s a timelessness which makes it impossible, or perhaps even unnecessary, to imagine when they were taken. Perhaps it’s because they are black and white, or perhaps it’s because they hark back to Nan Goldin’s genre defining 1980’s work such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and I’ll Be Your Mirror. Where Goldin is a photo-diarist, whose work is aligned with documentarians, Naito’s work seems less explicitly about capturing the truth. Instead Naito seeks to capture the models personae, their character…something that these transvestites and transsexuals have in abundance.There’s a joy in how the models revel in their own femininity, and a defiant pride rarely glimpsed elsewhere.
It’s a fascinating show, one filled with humour but also with an underlying message. Although they are nothing more than portraits you cannot help but imagine these people’s lives, their histories, and their childhoods. Charged with narrative Naito hasn’t just captured the sitters’ personae but their energy, their spirit and their situation. Where Goldin’s work dates to a distinctly post-stonewall era Naito’s is more modern and the two bodies of work make an interesting comparison. It leaves you wondering has anything really changed?
The West Side Rendezvous book is available from Wild Life Press, with a foreword by fashion designer Ebru Ercon.
The West Side Rendezvous exhibition is at LN-CC.