Untitled (boots)

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.

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”.

late 1970s

Move to New York

After graduating she moves to New York and begins documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene and the city's vibrant post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

late 1970s

Her subjects take shape

By the end of the 1970s her circle of subjects takes shape: domestic sketches with her boyfriend Brian, drug-addicted friends, cross-dressers, the New York bohemia. Her themes — sexual assertiveness and confession — are tied to gender, provocation and the new realism.