As in life, so too in these images, the lines between inner self & outer self are often hidden or blurred
For much of the late 19th- to mid- 20th Century, materials referencing sex or gender were deemed obscene, prurient or pornographic & were thus mailed wrapped in plain brown paper to keep their contents hidden from the eyes of the censors.
The images in this book were assembled from scans of photographs in my personal collection of Cabinet Cards & Cartes de Visite from the American Gilded Age, 1865 to 1900. I discovered much about the photographers who took these images, but found next to nothing about the people themselves. So, in a sense, they were already in a “metaphoric” closet, their inner selves hidden forever behind the outer selves captured by the camera
