Tag: human rights

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Day in the Life of a Black Transgender NYC Woman: A 17-Year Video Study

We meet Tiffany, with her then boyfriend, Nate, in the Marsha P. Norman Harlem shelter for queer children in Harlem in 2008. We follow up with her again in 2014 where she lives in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and again in 2024 at the entrance of a midtown subway in Manhattan.

There are 34 short segments in this series. It is an unvarnished look into one transgender woman’s life but the issues that plague our society; race, inequality, gender, mental health, poverty, sexuality, and so much more, ripple through every segment.

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Is The Women’s Hijab Iran’s Berlin Wall?

We were traveling in Iran, 2014. We were in the designated world heritage’s Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Esfahan. I met a group of young travelers. As you can see from this short video, it was a robust and ebullient group. Suddenly a woman shrouded in black, with her four male colleagues, tapped on one of the woman’s shoulder instructing her to correct her headscarf. She had too much hair exposed. In less than three seconds the woman shut down from an urbane cosmopolitan to a mix of shame, frustration, rage, resignation and protective humor.

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From the PEN Archive: Salman Rushdie and Writers on the Selfie, Fatwa, Freedom of Expression and More.

Writers, Orhan Pamuk, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie taking selfies, pre-iPhone with Pamuk’s new camera. PEN World Voices, Cooper Union, New York City, 2007.

Selfies before the iPhone with Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk and Margaret Atwood, Cooper Union, NYC, 2007.
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