Transcend

Freedom to Love

The latest in the groundbreaking series of photobooks on LGBTQ life around the world, an intimate, personal collection of photographs on the queer community in the U.S.

“Sandra Chen Weinstein’s images—often artfully framed, with a disarming intimacy—reveal a vibrant, complicated community, one we rarely see in the American press.” —Carol McCusker, curator of photography, Harn Museum of Art

Recent years have seen an unprecedented push by state legislatures to pass anti-LGBTQ bills across the United States. Hundreds of laws, mainly attempting to ban access to gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth and to ban discussions of gender identity and sexuality from high school curricula, have been introduced this year alone—a new and deeply troubling record.

In these times visual representation of queer love is as important as it has ever been, and in Transcend, award-winning Taiwanese American photographer Sandra Chen Weinstein showcases some of the work from a long career of photographing the LGBTQ community, especially the trans community. Weinstein’s own child recently came out as queer, trans, and non-binary at the age of twenty-eight, and the core of the book is a series of photographs that focuses on their relationship.

A gorgeously packaged, full-color book, Transcend challenges many assumptions about LGBTQ life in the United States and is an enduring visual testament to the strength, resilience, and joy of the queer community in the face of discrimination, inequality, and violence.

Transcend was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

Praise

“Sandra Chen Weinstein’s stunning new monograph pushes the conversation forward in the lives of the LGBTQ+ community. Profound, brilliant, and insightful, Chen Weinstein’s extraordinary color portraits are accompanied by candid interviews, including her own, both capturing the complexity of identity as well as providing a mirror of the times.”
—Elizabeth Avedon, independent curator
“I love when the personal becomes universal as it does so thoughtfully in Transcend. Sandra Chen Weinstein takes the ‘unconditional love’ she has for her own child Lee and shines it on the LGBTQ+ community, bringing us these tender and enlightening portraits. The strength and affirmation in these images remind me that we all ‘contain multitudes’ as part of the larger human family. This thought, this book, comforts me and brings me joy.”
—Sarah Leen, co-founder of the Visual Thinking Collective and former director of photography at National Geographic

Goodreads Reviews