Chantal regnault biography of barack

Featured photographs, by author Chantal Regnault, are of Anthony Pendavis, an anonymous performer and Cesar Valentin at Lamour Pendavis Ball, Mark Ballroom, , at Missing: barack.

She gives us heroes that continue to echo and reverberate around the world. Ballroom is held up as a place of self-realization, of protection, of family of choice, but also of courage. The photographer Chantal Regnault, herself a living testimony and icon of ballroom photography, has selected 15 photographs from a largely unseen corpus to share this intense, formative period in the history of voguing and ballroom in New York with a wider audience.

The series creates a monument to this most intimate, stirring and uplifting time and its protagonists. But even though these competitions were organized within the queer community, black participants were still not able to escape discrimination as they had to aspire to white beauty ideals. From the 70s, black and brown participants therefore increasingly started to organize their own Balls featuring a variety of categories — including realness, runway, body, face and vogue performance.

The development of the Balls ran parallel to the emergence of Houses headed by older drag and trans personalities.

French-born photographer and documentarist Chantal Regnault left Paris for New York after the May uprisings.

The Houses also provided a family structure where the most socially fragilized members of the community, often the younger ones, could take refuge and find protection and advice from the older Mothers. The Houses would compete against each other during the Balls, the best participants receiving tens from the jury and winning trophies, leading to fame and social standing not only for themselves but also for their House.

The final goal was achieving legendary or iconic status. Until the late 80s the Balls were held in Harlem, mainly at the Elke Lodge and when it closed down the community started to look for new spaces downtown and beyond in Brooklyn and New Jersey. During the 90s the culture that had originated in New York branched out to major cities in the US and in the s started to spread all around the world.

Even though the situation of queer people in mainstream society has generally improved since the s, the basic principles of Ballroom culture, including self expression, emancipation, and celebrating yourself are as relevant and necessary today as they were 50 years ago. Chantal Regnault was born in France, has lived in the United States since , and visited Haiti frequently since From the late 70s to the early 90s her work was mostly focused on marginal cultures that were flourishing in New York back then.

The Ballroom Scene is a part of this body of work.