Casa Susanna.
Capozzola, Christopher
Casa Susanna
Edited by Michel Hurst and Robert Swope, powerHouseBooks. 156
pages, $29.95
Sometimes, when libraries catalogue books about everyday life, they
use the notation "Homes and Haunts." I can't think of a
better way to categorize Casa Susanna, a fascinating photographic record
of a transvestite community that gathered in the Catskill Mountains town
of Hunter, New York, in the 1950's and early 60's, and a book
that manages to be homey and haunting at the same time. The photographs,
which Robert Swope recently uncovered at a flea market in New York City,
are both familiar and strange. Some are predictable drag shots: as the
residents of Casa Susanna camp for the camera, readers might agree with
Swope that "these initial images, while amusing, basically bored
me." But what's brilliant about the ladies of Casa Susanna is
how they turned the mundane into the magnificent. Many of the
photographs are, at first glance, indistinguishable from the fading
mid-century snapshots that fill American attics: family dinners,
slightly tipsy parties, the gathering in the kitchen of women of a
certain age. They have a delicious kitsch appeal--plastic slipcovers and
artificial Christmas trees, rhinestone glasses and scratchy nylon hose.
There is a homey-ness here, one that was, as Swope points out, "a
studied illusion." Casa Susanna testifies to the enduring spirit of
the people who gathered there against the odds, and reminds us that
there was far more going on before Stonewall than we tend to think, even
if much of it took place behind closed doors. Peeking into their world
forty years ago is thrilling, but also a little disconcerting: without
their full history, without the captions that would turn these
photographs into living history, the world of Casa Susanna remains just
out of reach, haunting us with the silence of snapshots discarded in
flea market bins.
