Episode 17 / To Be Seen

In 1967, Mariette Pathy Allen photographed a woman walking past a storefront mannequin somewhere between New Jersey and Philadelphia. The image appears simple at first: a pedestrian, a display window, the ordinary rhythm of the street. Yet something unstable begins to emerge between the moving body and the constructed figure behind glass.

This episode explores how walking unfolds not only through urban space, but through systems of visibility already shaping how bodies appear and are recognized. Moving between Allen’s early street photograph and her later work with transgender and gender-nonconforming communities, the episode reflects on photography, gender, presence, and the fragile boundary between the lived body and the body as representation.

Walking here becomes movement through a field of visibility.

Mariette Pathy Allen’s photograph from 1967 emerges during a period when street photography had reached a particular intensity. Across cities in North America and Europe, photographers moved through public space with handheld cameras, attentive to fleeting alignments, gestures, and encounters unfolding in real time. Walking and photography became inseparable activities, grounded in movement, contingency, and the possibility that something briefly visible might be held within the frame.

This episode focuses on a photograph Allen made somewhere in the New Jersey / Philadelphia region in 1967. In the picture, a woman walks past a storefront window containing a mannequin. At first, the scene appears entirely ordinary. Yet the photograph slowly opens onto questions of visibility, representation, and the body within systems of social expectation.

The episode examines how this closeness transforms both photography and walking. Walking here is not solitary or contemplative, but negotiated within density and contact. The photograph depends on movement through shared space, on a body navigating among other bodies, searching briefly for an opening from which the photograph can happen.

The episode also situates this early photo in relation to Allen’s later photographic work with transgender and gender-nonconforming communities, particularly from the 1970s onward. Rather than imposing categories or fixed identities, Allen’s photographs remain attentive to presence, self-presentation, and the complexity of being seen. Seen retrospectively, the 1967 photograph begins to carry traces of these later concerns.

Within the broader trajectory of Photography and Walking, the episode introduces another dimension of walking itself: not only movement through streets and cities, but movement through structures that shape how bodies come into view and how identities are recognized.

See Mariette Pathy Allen’s photo from the New-Jersey / Philadelphia series (1967).

Sources & Further Reading

Images & Works

Mariette Pathy Allen. New Jersey / Philadelphia series. 1967.

Mariette Pathy Allen. Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them. Dutton, 1989.

Mariette Pathy Allen. The Gender Frontier. Kehrer Verlag, 2003.

Texts & Ideas

Susan Sontag. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

Judith Butler. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990. 

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking. Oxford University Press, 2001.