Kalina Isato has had an eye on the transgender club scene. And now she wants to give everyone else an all-access peek.
The Philadelphia-based photographer recently opened “Clublife,” an exhibition of her photography featuring transgender women, through Dec. 31 at the William Way LGBT Community Center.
“It’s a celebration of all the fun things about being transgender,” she said. “But also, it shows the candid moments of what happens behind the scenes at certain events. It’s not just the entertainers, but also the people that comprise the party. There are a number of introspective images that are monochrome on one side of the wall. There are also black-and-white and color images that are part of the series.”
The exhibition, ranging from panoramic club photos to vivid collages, gives viewers just a small taste of the kind of photographs Isato has taken during her many years in the trans community.
“I’ve been in the club scene for a long, long time — since 1991,” she said. “All along, I have been taking pictures of people and various places I’ve been to. At first, I didn’t have any focus on trying to create an exhibit or gallery. My goal was to just document and capture images of every party night that I was at. Over time, I started showing these images to friends and family members. It was really cool and a lot of people encouraged me to show these images to other people. I started this site called Transvamp.com. It’s been around since 1992. I’ve been posting my pictures up on that site.”
For Isato, 41, the club scene in Philly is a far cry from the environment she was born and raised in: Brooklyn, New York. She said the proximity to the more-cosmopolitan Manhattan didn’t do much to make her neighborhood hospitable to diversity.
“I wanted to get out of Brooklyn because my neighborhood was Bensonhurst,” she said. “It wasn’t very conducive toward anything that was not vanilla-straight. It’s very Irish-Catholic and conservative. I was very different. I was Asian. I didn’t know back then how different I was. It was easy to say, ‘Maybe he or she is gay.’ But I wasn’t. There was something else about me that was different. A lot of people saw this. Others didn’t or didn’t want to or care to. I just decided, I’m going to get out of this neighborhood. All of my friends back in my Brooklyn neighborhood stayed there all their lives. A lot of them didn’t have any aspirations to move out of Brooklyn. That might be fine for them, but for me, I wanted something more. I wanted to be around people who were more open to things. I applied to several schools in big cities. I went to Boston University and there was a very diverse crown there. It was a joy to attend school there. I went to Philadelphia for graduate school at Penn and it was another large, diverse group of people from all over the world.”
Isato’s talents extend far beyond her skills behind the camera lens. She has written eight books, including titles like “Natural Makeup,” “The Art of Gender Illusion” and “The Sexy Vampire Cookbook.” Most of her books are about makeup and transformation for male-to-female cross-dressers and transsexuals.
“I write books all the time,” she said. “I’m writing a new book now. The most recent book is called ‘Passable.’ It’s a 210-page book on everything that a trans girl should know to become passable. I kept on writing and writing and I said this is going to expand to a second volume. So the second book is going to be called ‘Passable 2,’ but that’s not going to be out until three years from now. I try to create a new book every three years. I can’t say that I’ve made a lot of money off of these things, but I’ve helped the community by exposing to a large audience all of the things that are necessary to become more passable to improve one’s makeup-application skills.”
Isato said the books draw deep from her experiences in developing her various aesthetics over the years.
“Originally, I considered myself more of a drag-club kid — a part-time cross-dresser,” she said. “A lot of people liked that look and as I progressed through different looks, there were different people from the community that came forward and said, ‘It’s great.’ I have fans that run the gamut from the part-time cross-dressers who like the more drag look to the more realistic girls who are in stealth who are out in society and nobody knows that they are trans.”
In her books, Isato is a strong advocate against the use of plastic surgery, which she believes is unnecessary for most trans individuals.
“I believe that the natural features of people’s faces, that’s what God gave them, that’s what their parents gave them, and you kind of work with what you have rather than try to alter things quickly,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of bad plastic-surgery jobs and they’re just not pretty. They could have simply tried to work with their features to improve on what they have instead of obliterate what they already had, which was probably fine to begin with.”
Aside from her books, Isato has also found success in the world of music as a producer. Under the name Gorgeous Girl, her music has appeared on a number of TV shows.
“From 1988-2001, I was doing a lot of music production in the studio and at home,” she said. “It wasn’t until 2000 that I got my big break. I hired the services of a promoter to push my music onto MTV. Fourteen episodes of ‘Made’ have my songs on them and ‘The Osbournes’ has one of my tracks on the show. It was pretty cool that I was able to get my music out into the real world this way. I’ve tried to do this all on my own before, just self-promoting, and it wasn’t working. Going out to clubs, handing out records and having them play it is a great thrill. But the thing is, that’s only one club and I’m only one person. So having this promoter to help push my music to bigger venues and places is awesome. I can get my music to much more people that way.”
Kalina Isato’s “Clublife” exhibition is on display through Dec. 31 at The William Way LGBT Community Center, 1315 Spruce St. For more information, visit www.waygay.org or www.transvamp.com.
Larry Nichols can be reached at [email protected].