To Be Seen

In 1967, Mariette Pathy Allen photographed a woman walking past a storefront mannequin somewhere between New Jersey and Philadelphia.
At first, the image appears ordinary: a pedestrian, a display window, the rhythm of the street continuing around them. But slowly, something unstable begins to emerge between the moving figure and the constructed body behind glass.
This episode explores how walking unfolds not only through urban space, but through systems of visibility already shaping how bodies are seen, interpreted, and 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.
As the photograph opens, walking becomes something more than movement through the city. It becomes movement through expectations, images, and structures that already existed before the body arrived.

Related images and references:
photographyandwalking.com

En 1967, Mariette Pathy Allen photographie une femme marchant devant un mannequin dans une vitrine quelque part entre le New Jersey et Philadelphie.
À première vue, l’image semble ordinaire : une passante, une vitrine, le rythme de la rue qui continue autour d’elles. Mais peu à peu, quelque chose d’instable commence à émerger entre la figure en mouvement et le corps construit derrière la vitre.
Cet épisode explore la manière dont la marche se déploie non seulement dans l’espace urbain, mais aussi à travers des systèmes de visibilité qui façonnent déjà la manière dont les corps sont vus, interprétés et reconnus. En reliant cette photographie de rue précoce au travail ultérieur d’Allen auprès des communautés transgenres et non conformes au genre, l’épisode réfléchit à la photographie, au genre, à la présence et à la frontière fragile entre le corps vécu et le corps comme représentation.
À mesure que l’image s’ouvre, marcher devient autre chose qu’un simple déplacement dans la ville. Cela devient un mouvement à travers des attentes, des images et des structures déjà présentes avant même l’arrivée du corps.

Related images and references:
photographyandwalking.com

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Music: “Beat ’em with Rhythm” by Victor Natas, edited for this podcast (CC BY 4.0, Freesound.org).

Produced by Productions 3655 Inc.  

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:13

In this photo, a woman walks toward the camera. She is slightly off center, her coat light against the darker tones of the street, her gaze forward, but not fixed, as if moving through rather than toward something. Around her, the city continues without interruption. Cars pass, pedestrians cross behind her, buildings extend upward in measured rhythm. To her right, a storefront window interrupts that flow. Behind the glass a mannequin stands, still, upright, composed, dressed and arranged to be seen. For a moment the two figures, the woman and the mannequin, enter into the same field, one moving, one fixed. And yet, held together within the same frame, they begin to approach one another in a way that is not entirely stable. This photograph was made in 1967 by Marriott Paythey Allen. At that moment, she was still at the beginning of what would become a long photographic practice, one that over the following decades would turn toward transgender and gender nonconforming communities, building a body of work grounded in proximity, trust, and sustained attention. Her later photographs, many of them brought together in her book, The Gender Frontier, did not observe from a distance. They remained close to the people they portrayed, allowing presence to emerge without being reduced. That work belonged largely to the nineteen seventies onward. But here, in nineteen sixty seven, we were earlier. And yet something was already in place. To understand this moment, it helps to situate the photo within the broader field of photography in the nineteen sixties. This was a decade in which street photography had reached a certain intensity. Photographers moved through cities with increasing freedom, responding to what unfolded in front of them, attentive to gesture, to alignment, to the fleeting structure of an instant. Many photographers were working in this space, each in their own way, but all grounded in the same condition, walking through the city, camera in hand, waiting for something to happen. The photograph depended on contingency, on the fact that something appeared, briefly, and could be held. Walking in this context was inseparable from seeing. The photographer walked, the subjects walked, and the pictures emerged from that shared movement. Alan's photograph participated in this world. But it also began to shift it, because what happened here was not only the recording of a passing moment, something else was introduced. If we stay close to the picture, slowly the structure becomes clearer. The woman walking toward the camera occupied the sidewalk as a subject among others. She was not isolated, not staged, not singled out through any dramatic gesture. Her presence was direct, but not emphatic. She moved. Beside her the mannequin did not. Placed behind glass, framed by the interior of the store, the mannequin was arranged according to another logic. It was posed, constructed, presented as an image of the body rather than a body itself. Its function was not to move, but to be seen. The glass complicated this further. Reflections from the street overlaid the mannequin's surface, bringing fragments of the outside world into the interior space, while the figure inside remained visible, stable, contained. Interior and exterior began to collapse into one another. Surface and depth no longer separated cleanly. And it is at this point that the photograph opens, because what was at stake was not only the contrast between a living figure and an artificial one, it was a question of visibility, who appeared, how they appeared, and under what conditions. So walking here was not simply movement through space. It was movement through a field of visibility. The woman occupied the street as a subject, but she did so within a system that already structured how bodies were seen, how they were read, and how they were positioned in relation to one another. The mannequin introduced that system in its most condensed form, a body constructed, a body arranged, a body designed to correspond to an expectation. If we return to Alan's later work, this becomes even more significant. From the nineteen seventies onward, her photography turned toward individuals whose lives unfolded outside normative definitions of gender. Her images did not impose categories onto those individuals. They remained attentive to presence, to self presentation, to the ways in which identity was lived rather than assigned. This is where her importance lay, not in defining, but in allowing, not in stabilizing, but in holding open. Seen from that later position, Allen's nineteen sixty seven photograph begins to shift. The alignment between the walking woman and the mannequin in the vitrine is no longer only formal. It becomes structural. The mannequin could be understood as a form of constructed femininity, an image of the body shaped by external expectations, posed in advance, stabilized into a recognizable form. The woman walking along the sidewalk moved within that same visual field. She was not outside it, but neither was she fully contained by it. The photograph does not resolve this relation. It does not tell us whether the two figures opposed one another, mirrored one another, or overlapped. Instead, it allows that uncertainty to remain. This is where this photo resonates beyond its moment, because it doesn't simply document a street scene. It holds a tension between different ways of being seen, between the body as lived and the body as constructed, between movement and stillness, and between presence and representation. In much of the nineteen sixties street photography, the figure in the image carries a kind of specificity, a gesture, a glance, a posture, something that marks the individual as singular, irreducible to a type. Allen's photograph does not remove that entirely, but it places that specificity alongside a form that operates differently. The mannequin was not specific, it was repeatable. It belonged to a system. And it was precisely this coexistence that mattered, because the photograph does not separate the two, it brings them into the same frame. For a project concerned with photography and walking, Alan's photo introduces another dimension. Walking is often understood as movement through the city, through space, through time. Here, it also becomes movement through systems of visibility, through expectations that preceded the individual, through images that already existed before the body arrived. And this is where Alan's position as a photographer whose later work engaged deeply with gender diversity becomes essential. Her photographs do not simply show people, they participate in a shift, a movement away from fixed categories, toward a more open understanding of how identity appears, how it is lived, and how it is recognized. This did not need to be stated explicitly in the picture. It is not illustrated, it is not even announced, but it is present. There is a quite restraint in the way the photograph holds itself. Nothing is exaggerated, nothing is pushed forward. The alignment between the two figures could easily go unnoticed, and yet once seen, it doesn't disappear. The longer one stays with the picture, the less stable the separation becomes, in fact. The mannequin in the window begins to echo the posture of the walking woman. The woman, passing by, begins to take on a certain stillness within the frame. Movement and immobility begin to intersect. This is not a collapse into equivalence, it is a proximity, and in that proximity something shifts. So while earlier episodes of photography and walking move through walking as encounter, as duration, as collision, here walking becomes something else again. It becomes presence within a structured field, a way of moving through systems that shape how bodies come into view. The photograph does not resolve that condition or propose an answer. It remains attentive. And in doing so, it creates a space in which different ways of being can coexist. This is Photography and Walking. I'm Philippe. You can see related images and references for this and other episodes on the website photographyandwalking.com. You can also listen on YouTube and your preferred podcast platform. From time to time, I send a short note with references or fragments connected to the episodes. If you'd like to receive it, you can leave your email through the contact page on the website. Thank you for listening. See you next time.