The Snapshot and the Museum: Trans Vernacular Photography 1950-Present

Ariel Goldberg, Esperanza Santos and Sophie Hackett discuss trans records of self-representation across time, place, gender and technology. How do trans photographic records spanning the 1950s to the present move in and out of public and private spaces, from homes to museums, social media, and archives? Curator Sophie Hackett has worked extensively with the Casa Susanna photographs, which document a New York crossdressing retreat and trans network from the mid-twentieth century. The conversation will consider the Casa Susanna photographs in dialogue with later trans visual documents to unpack contexts of personal risk, race, class, economics of the erotic, privacy, and public advocacy. Independent writer Ariel Goldberg will moderate this conversation with Hackett and scholar Esperanza Santos who will share about their work building an archive of a Trans Femme Latina community in Northern California in 2026. Goldberg will share personal snapshots encountered in trans-gay-male activist Lou Sullivan (1951-1991) correspondences, housed in the GLBT Historical Society’s collection. Tuesday, November 3 | 6:30- 8:00pm ET In-person and online Doors open at 6:00 Magnum Foundation | 59 East 4th St, 7W | New York, NY 10003 To attend online, register here About the presenters Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, educator, and conflict mediator. Their books include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s, which tells the story of six political education projects, is forthcoming from Inventory Press + Lelsie Lohman Museum of Art in 2027. A companion book-in-progress, Seeking Captions received a 2026 New York State Council of the Arts grant with the Magnum Foundation, a 2024 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship at New York Public Library; and a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Award. Recent writing has appeared in Afterimage Journal, e-flux, and Jewish Currents. Goldberg has curated public programs and exhibitions for over fifteen years at venues including Magnum Foundation, The Poetry Project, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York. Goldberg has taught photography, writing, and contemporary art practices independently, and at Bard College, The New School, New York University, Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, and Rutgers University. They are a proud member of Academics Come Together—United Auto Workers (ACT-UAW) Local 7902 and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Esperanza Onoria Santos is a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University-Newark in the American Studies PhD program. She writes at the intersection of Trans Studies and Latino studies through her dissertation titled “Trans Latina Femmes: Lives, Livelihoods, and Agency in the Contemporary United States." Using methods of English, Oral History, and Social Movement History, she develops ways of seeing and creating aliveness for trans Latinas in the post 1960s U.S.. Altogether, her work engages the convergence of transgender politics, asylum, Latinx radicalization, citizenship, immigration activism, and borders. Sophie Hackett is the Curator, Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. Hackett’s areas of specialty include vernacular photographs, photography in relation to queerness, and photography in Canada. She has curated and/or collaborated on a wide range of exhibitions and their accompanying publications, including What It Means to Be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility (2014), Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s (2016), Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971 (2020), What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life (2022) and Casa Susanna (2023). Her published writing includes “Queer Looking” in Aperture (spring 2015), “Encounters in the Museum: The Experience of Photographic Objects” in The “Public” Life of Photographs (Ryerson Image Centre and MIT Press, 2016), and “Bobbie in Context” in the award-winning volume Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (Steidl and The Walther Collection, 2020). Hackett is the editor of the first book on the AGO's photography collection, Collective States: Worlds of Photography at the AGO (AGO / Delmonico Books, 2025). Image credit: Luis Mora Magnum Foundation is in an elevator building and has a restroom that is wheelchair accessible and gender-neutral. For access requests or questions, please contact [email protected]. Magnum Foundation events are made possible by the Henry Nias Foundation and our Circle of Friends. This event is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts. Header image by Nestor Lopez Lupercio, “Flor in her garden. Flor by her home,” 2026. Flor poses by her flowers in urban-rural Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California. She fled Rosarito, Baja California, Mexico after being terrorized by police. For some time, she lived out of her truck in North California. A director of a transgender health clinic helped her apply for asylum, secure housing, and access healthcare. Resolute, she takes care of other trans Latinas in her community.