THE WOMEN OF SAN QUENTIN
Exhibition at Anantara Riverside Hotel in Bangkok - WPATH
Kristin Schreier Lyseggen started working on this project before we learned that Private Bradley Manning was Chelsea Manning and before we knew of the popular Netflix TV show “Oranges Is the New Black”. In real life, women with gender identity issues are put in male prisons with notorious predators. The only options for many of them in order to survive is by living isolated in a cell, or becoming a sex slave for another inmate. From author of "The Boy Who Was Not a Lesbian & Other True Stories, comes a new project about 10 survivors in solitary; a project that led Kris from a “war” zone in East Oakland to a one bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin of San Francisco and a transgender conference in Bangkok; to an event with former ‘FBI most wanted’ Angela Davis to a new LGBT project in Nairobi, Kenya; From ‘Wikileaks Private Manning’ to the “notorious, white suprematist bank robber” in Illinois who grew up playing with Madam Nhu’s children in Saigon. Kris came to the understanding that the people in her new book are moving towards becoming themselves no matter the costs. But their trauma will stay with them forever. If they didn’t have trauma before they went into prison, they certainly will have it by now. But this book also led her to a world of gender diversity; To a place with community spirit, advocacy and activism; to an immense struggle, unemployment and imprisonment among people with gender identity issues. Kristin learned from these strong and humorous freedom fighters that humanity was to be found everywhere, even among severely abused individuals. Trained as a photographer in the UK, Bangkok and California with a background as a journalist from Norway, Kristin´s calling is to tell true stories and create images that communicate survival and activism. After many years working for the mainstream press, both as a news reporter and as a photographer with little time to go in depth on individual projects she started collecting stories about individuals with gender identity issues.
