Naomi, close up

1970s

School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

She enrolls at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts together with her friend from Satya, David Armstrong; there she meets Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe and begins to photograph in color. She graduates in 1977 or 1978: she has worked mostly with Cibachrome prints but has also begun showing slides, and her work of this period is associated with the Boston School of Photography.

c. 1972

Life among Boston's drag queens

Living in downtown Boston at eighteen, she falls in with the drag queens, lives among them and photographs them — not to expose them but with respect and love: she wants to show them as a third gender and admires people who re-create themselves. She later admitted in an interview with Bomb that she was in love with one of the “queens”.

1973

First solo show in Boston

The show is built on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transgender communities, to which her friend David Armstrong introduced her. Among her work of the period is “Ivy wearing a fall, Boston”.