Once upon the time, long ago in … oh we’d say the Jackie Kennedy 60’s, there were a bunch of mad, drunk queens.
Very mad, and very drunk.
They were living, it seems, in upstate New York. Or perhaps just visiting. There in a roomy white summer house, nicknamed Casa Susanna after the den-mother of the group (right, actually a professional drag impersonator), they would put on their bouffant wigs and black lace negligees.
They would sit on ugly sofas amid heavy dark-wood furniture and live out spoofy drag lives, making beautiful memories courtesy of Kodachrome.
Sometimes poloroid snapshots are all we have left of people.
So it is with Susanna and her “gals.”
The photo below, for example, which we’ve entitled Photo Shoot in an Awfully Small Room, was taken one wild night at the Casa Susanna. The photo is what in the art world is known as a found object, part of a collection of snapshots discovered in a flea market by a shopper who just happened to have an art-educated eye and saw them as the Diane Arbus-like treasures they were: Fantasy Identity meets Vernacular Photography.
The give-away that this is not a simple snapshot but a carefully constructed tableau is in the calculation of its shapes and colors. The massing of the women in black to form a pyramid, the fact that the two short dresses in the foreground are the same aqua color, one seeming to mirror the other like the reflection in a pond. Even the blonde shutterbug in the rear, who looks determinedly back at us, is reminiscent of the audience-aware figures in Mannerist paintings.
“What struck me that first day (after finding and buying the photos from a flea market),” writes Robert Swope who has just turned this treasure trove into the must-have book Casa Susanna, “was the normalcy of the images, even if it was studied illusion. Here were photos documenting everyday women, going about their everyday lives — except that these women were men who probably lived as truck drivers, accountants, or bank presidents during the week.
“Casa Susanna was the name of the Victorian house where these men would wile away their weekends in all sorts of vaguely conventional poses.”
The photos, notes Swope, “show women basically as housewives who know how to dress up for a night out, and certainly don’t mind having a mid-afternoon drink at home.
“These photos are representative of the collection, and if one looks carefully — for they demand careful attention — the photographs all share similar characteristics. Everywhere there is a sense of community, a tenderness, a playfulness, and more often than not a frank gaze into the camera as if to assert ‘Yes, this is who I am. I’m just like you.’”
Nightcharm interviewed Robert Swope and his co-editor/ life-partner Michel Hurst about the Susanna collection. Jointly, the men run the Full House gallery, which specializes in vernacular decorative arts, featuring high-art Charles Eames loungers as well as campy 1940’s stallion-head lamps:
Nightcharm: As designers, what did you think of all the sincere, plastic-covered decor at the Casa Susanna?
Swope & Hurst: The main interest of the interiors resides in their banality. It could be the house of any straight couple: tacky with some touches of cheap romanticism. To us it fits perfectly the efforts of the group at being mainstream ladies. There is no real attempt aesthetically in the decor. Outside of a certain effort to make it look as though women reside there and not men.
NC: What did you think when you first came upon this box of photos at the flea market?
Swope: At first, I found myself sorting through dozens of loose eight-by-ten glossy prints of transvestites, “drag queens” from the early Sixties. These initial images, while amusing, basically bored me. They looked like some actor’s audition head shots. For a few moments I considered buying them, but then thought, Why bother? After all, they’re fairly traditional, formal publicity shots of just more guys in drag mugging for the camera.
I began to lose interest when suddenly I came across something completely different — a small image of what was obviously a drag queen on an ugly sofa with plastic slipcovers happily knitting while dressed in conservative women’s daywear. I felt electrified. I had never seen anything like this that had not been clearly orchestrated as a parody or a joke, and my instincts told me this was neither.
The times depicted in the photos were the late Fifties to mid-Sixties, still ahead of the sexual liberation later in the decade. Their style of dress alternated between conservative, proper outfits and cheap but glamorous fashions.
The collection, one might say, was the “family album” of Susanna, a professional female impersonator — as her business card glued to one of the album covers attested. The pictures show Susanna and a group of her male friends who would gather at a house in upstate New York to dress up and live for the weekend as typical, middle class suburban women, complete with tacky furniture and a Scrabble board.
I feverishly began tearing through the box, determined to find every single one of these photographs. I eventually retrieved about 400 images. I had just found the real mother lode, the holy grail. I knew instantly that I was looking at something that no one outside the group was ever meant to see.
NC: Did you ever find out who these men were?
Swope & Hurst: We made the decision NOT to research the people in the pictures because we were interested in the photos as historic documents. Something that happened at a certain time (1955-1965) in a certain place. What happened to the people in the photos afterwards was not our concern. We are not interested in any subsequent, sensational, sad or gossipy story or anecdote.
The men in the pictures seem to be already well into their 30’s. These photos were taken 50 to 60 years ago. Are they still alive? We don’t know and don’t care to know. Certain stones should remain unturned.
But we must add that since we published the book “what happened to those people?” has been the number one most asked question. We ask the public to concentrate their curiosity on the facts depicted here. After that, one is free to imagine and dream.
Casa Susanna, a stylish, medium-size coffee table book, is available from powerHouse Books.
Also available at Amazon.
You can learn more about Robert Swope and Michel Hurst at their Full House 20th Century Design website
i think ure sexy
I always look through photo albums at flea markets and garage sales hoping to find something just like this.