NEW YORK, NY.- Loren Cameron was in his early 30s when he bought his first suit, walking nervously into a haberdashery for short men. Size was a delicate subject for him. He was 5 foot 3 and wanted so much to be bigger, equating masculinity with heft — which is why he was also a dedicated bodybuilder.
The salesman sized him up “as a regular working-class Joe,” as Cameron put it, who was entering unfamiliar territory, and set out to teach him the rituals of fine dressing. He fitted Cameron into a double-breasted, Italian-made suit, taught him the difference between a half and a full Windsor tie knot and showed him four variations on folding a pocket square.
He even offered dating advice: Never give a woman a rose on a first date. Offer carnations instead.
Cameron took a self-portrait in that snappy suit, handsome, bearded and brandishing a bunch of carnations, creating one of many tender and lovely photographs of transgender men like himself that he collected in “Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits,” published in 1996.
“I felt at least two inches taller when I walked out of there,” Cameron wrote of his suit-shopping adventure, “and it wasn’t because of the elevator shoes.”
Cameron, a photographer and activist whose depictions of transgender people — and documentation of his own experience — inspired a generation, died on Nov. 18 at his home in Berkeley, California. He was 63.
The cause was suicide, said his sister Susan Tarleton, adding that he had suffered from congestive heart failure. He had been isolated from friends and family for many years, and his death was not widely reported at the time.
When “Body Alchemy” appeared, it was a revelation. At the time it was groundbreaking, even radical, to photograph transgender people as regular folk, rather than as exotics or freaks or medical specimens, and rarer still for the lensman to be transgender.
Images of transgender women were more familiar than those of transgender men, and they were often famous figures, like Christine Jorgensen, the American actress whose transition surgery in the 1950s was front-page news, and Jan Morris, the British journalist and travel writer who wrote of her own transition in her 1974 memoir, “Conundrum.”
Over the decades, fine artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus “have all trained their lenses on the transgendered figure,” Kate Bornstein, the gender theorist and author, wrote in The Bay Area Reporter in reviewing the book upon its release. “Never have the transgendered seriously photographed their own. Not until Loren Cameron, that is.”
In “Body Alchemy,” for perhaps the first time, transgender men could see representations of themselves outside of the pages of medical texts.
There was Jeffrey, a Jewish man who had yearned to be a bar mitzvah, and was able to do so, affirming his heritage. Cameron photographed him in a prayer shawl and yarmulke.
Brynne, a rangy surfer, was shown in the back of his van pulling on his wet suit, short board at the ready. Stephan, a police sergeant honored for his valor who transitioned while on the job, was framed against his squad car.
There were nudes, too, the most potent of which was a photo of Cameron in a classic bodybuilder pose, back arched, muscles rippling, his body emblazoned with flame-shaped tattoos, injecting his buttock with a syringe of testosterone.
Cameron wrote eloquently and honestly of the challenges of therapies like his biweekly testosterone shot, which played havoc with his mood, escalating his temper and often making him emotionally distant from his partner, Kayt, a lesbian.
He framed a pair of portraits of himself with the typical responses his body often provoked, rendered in a bold typeface: “You’re so exotic! May I take your photograph?” “You must be some kind of freak.” “You don’t belong here.”
Despite such bigotry and stigma, Patricia Holt wrote in her review for The San Francisco Examiner in 1997, Cameron’s observations reflect “a kind of innocence and awe of the body.” She called the book a “poignant yet matter-of-fact study” of transgender people that was both “sensitive and insightful.”
Susan Stryker, the transgender historian, connected Cameron’s “breakthrough,” as she put it in a phone interview, to the AIDS crisis, when shifting notions of queer identity and community “allowed trans people previously marginalized within feminist and gay activism” to find greater visibility. “Loren was on the ground as that change was happening, and he documented it from the inside,” she said.
Cameron’s work was exhibited all over the country, in galleries and universities like Cornell, where he donated his papers in the early 2000s, when he was in his early 40s. Among his papers is his high school yearbook, showing a young woman as class president. “I was cute, huh?” Cameron wrote in the margin before he sent it to Cornell.
“He wasn’t invested in hiding that he had been a woman,” said Brenda Marston, curator of Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection. “He put his whole body and soul out there.”
Loren Rex Cameron was born on March 13, 1959, in Pasadena, California. His mother, Barbara (Chambers) Cameron, was an office manager at Sears. After her death in 1968, he moved to Dover, Arkansas, to live with his father, Robert, a nuclear engineer and nuclear plant manager.
Robert Cameron had a farm and raised horses, and Loren worked alongside him, building fences and taking care of the horses. He was daring and adventurous as a teenager, as he wrote in “Body Alchemy,” drag racing and rafting swollen rivers. He dressed in overalls and work boots and learned to swear like a trucker.
He was deeply uncomfortable in his female body, and at age 12 wrote away for information on sex changes. When a friend suggested he might be a lesbian, he thought, “Why not?” But classmates began to treat him as an outcast and he quit school and ran away from home, traveling the country by bus. He found work picking fruit and cleaning construction sites.
He ran a truck stop fuel station and joined a youth conservation-corps crew, where he met a group of lesbians who suggested he might find a like-minded community in San Francisco.
He lived as a lesbian for nine years before addressing his discomfort with his gender. He was 26, and had recently quit smoking pot and cigarettes. “For the first time in my life, I wasn’t numb,” he wrote.
As he began to transition, he took snapshots of the process, sending them to family and friends so they could get used to his new body and also see how happy he was. “What was initially a crude documentation of my personal journey became an impassioned mission,” he wrote. He took a basic photography class, bought a simple Pentax K1000 and began photographing other transgender people and learning their stories.
“I wanted the world to see us, I mean, really see us,” he wrote.
In addition to his sister Tarleton, Cameron is survived by two more sisters, Catanya Saltzman and Cameron Oppenheim, and a stepsister, Lynne Kelly.
Cameron often said his aesthetic was influenced by the photography books his parents had at home, work by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange that made vivid the stories his father had told of growing up poor during the Depression. His work ethic was inspired by his father, who taught him to mend fences and bale hay — to honor manual labor.
“The last time I saw him, he told me that I had a lot of guts to move to California with only a duffel bag and a hundred bucks in my pocket,” Cameron wrote. “I think if he could see me now, he would be proud to call me his son.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
