Broken With Sunshine

Sander Marsman’s ‘Dianna: Every Day Is Dressed Up’

Splash & Grab, Issue 3

In the house where I grew up we had a gate in the back garden that led through to my best friend’s house next door. We spent every day throughout our childhoods flitting through the gate into each other’s homes, virtually inseparable. A few years after my parents divorced, we moved out of that house, and a single man replaced us.

Shortly after his arrival, my friend’s father went to knock on the back door of our old house to be neighbourly, habitually using the gate in the garden as we always had. Maybe my friend’s father had surprised him, or maybe he hadn’t, but when the man answered the door he was dressed as a woman.

This tale is prominent to me because at that time, around 14 years ago, transgenderism was publicly uncommon; it seemed exotic and something that remained private. In accordance with society’s values, it was a story that we kept to ourselves. It came back to me in summer 2013 when I was at home in London and the doorbell rang.

Standing on the step outside was Dianna.

Dianna was born in 1935 as Léonard. For 55 years she lived her daily life as a man, but privately dressed herself as Dianna, making only occasional public appearances as a woman. When Léonard retired, Dianna had more time and space to exist, and she was able to do so publicly.

Sander Marsman’s book Dianna: Every Day Is Dressed Up, designed by Sigridur Asa Juliusdottir, includes a collection of Dianna’s self portraits from her personal album, made from the 1940s onwards, alongside Marsman’s own portraits of her, created during the daily ritual of visually becoming Dianna.

I first met Marsman when he came to stay in London from The Netherlands, whilst we were assisting Léonie Hampton. His work with Dianna was ongoing during that period, and we often shared the photographs we were making together.

On that day in 2013, Dianna had kindly come to my house to surprise me with a hand delivery of Marsman’s finished book, which she had signed on behalf of them both. Looking back, I realise I was so overwhelmed to see her in person, standing out of context at my front door, that I failed to invite her inside. I was struck by her confidence, how comfortable she was in her skin, how young at 78, but above all how present she was. Aside from seeing Dianna from a distance in the park once, I had only ever viewed her in photographs.

In considering Dianna’s own relationship with the images of herself, just as I had viewed her in numerous pictures before our meeting, I realised it was partly through photography that she existed for herself for 55 years. Outside of her emotional being, the images became the evidence of her actuality, a form of expression, and a space in the world for her true self. Without them, when she took off Dianna’s clothes she was Léonard. Their presence kept her continuously alive, if only in secret.

One of the most obvious purposes of photography is its evidential capacity, but the underside of the photograph as evidence bearer is its role as guardian of secrets. Dianna’s photographs act as both, they have a double life of their own.

At the beginning of the book she compares the personalities of herself and Léonard in lists, describing Dianna as lively, bright, hot, flamboyant, loves dancing, back sloping writing, doesn’t feel the cold, lots of friends. Disparately Léonard is shy, dull, cold, drab, can’t dance, forward sloping writing, feels the cold, few friends. In the book’s final photograph, Léonard stands at an aviation event. He is otherworldly and vacant, a diminutive of Dianna, merely occupying the same body. In her self portraits however, she is vibrant, present and wholly alive.

Depending on their context, the photographs share Dianna’s dual existence in character too. In Marsman’s book or on exhibition walls they are exuberant, unveiled and animated, unaffected by the opinion of the viewer. Yet in Dianna’s personal album they were hidden away, shy and characterless. They are a true mirror on herself and her life.

The capacity of the photographs as a tool for reflection interestingly extended to Marsman’s experience of making the work. When he arrived in London, he was contending with his own identity, and for him, time spent with Dianna was an attempt to answer specific questions. Who am I? Who do I want to be? How can I decrease the gap between those two identities?

The events of Dianna’s life embodied Marsman’s intrigue. Through her and her photographs, and the images he was making, Marsman did not only become enveloped in the questions he was asking but also the potential for answers. For him, Dianna was an extreme spectrum of experience and emotions. The photographs from her personal album illustrate her as the finished article, her ideal, but his images reveal the reality before the show. Equally, it is likely that Dianna saw herself reflected in him too, a man seeking clarity in the truth of his own self. The angles of Marsman’s pictures are in reach of Dianna, the camera becoming the symbol of a palpable mirror. They examine her skin, her body, her hair, and her ceremonial process of getting ready.

Indeed, whilst identity represents the soul of the book, ritual lies at its heart. In Josef Koudelka’s Gypsies, Czeslaw Milosz explored exile and wrote, ‘Rhythm is at the core of human life… ruled by the heartbeat and circulation of blood… Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar.’ For Dianna, if she was unable to be publicly transparent in her own existence, her habits were and are her anchor, and it is these practices that provide stability in a shifting existence, even when everything else is unresolved.

To accompany the book, Marsman shot a video of Dianna shaving her face, part of the practice of becoming herself each day. Both the footage and the behaviour are repetitive, thorough, intimate and consuming. At one point Marsman enquires, “Done?” Dianna replies, “No. Approximately 80 passes. The whole face is rubbed 80 times.” We see the substantial energy it takes to transform herself externally, and we begin to view the areas of her life where Dianna retrieves control, in a world in which she has often felt unable to fit.

The book includes Dianna’s personal inventory of her wardrobe, an alphabetic catalogue of each item, often detailing colour and size. It concludes with diary entries dating back to January 1^st 2012, colour coded into compartments of her life. Her diaries are filled with social appointments (Hare and Hounds [Beating the Bounds]), names of friends and acquaintances she spent time with (Frances, Len, Gerry…wheelchair lady and Brazilian), creative endeavours (made a stainless steel heart brooch), her daily attire (Skirt 16.14in 041cm White pleated short, Blouse Green slip type top [as a boob tube]), weather reports (broken with sunshine), and illnesses (nausea and irregular heart beat).

The rigidity of routine and the act of classifying her life clearly contrasts with the fluidity and openness of her identity and gender. It is fascinating that as a society we are so ready to label, rank and organise, basing acceptability within those boundaries, even if it opposes our natural behaviours. In Undoing Gender Judith Butler asks, ‘How is it that… transgender itself enters into our political field? It does this, I would suggest, by not only making us question what is real, and what has to be, but by showing us how contemporary notions of reality can be questioned and new modes of reality instituted… Bodies are not inhabited as spatial givens.’

Occasionally in the diaries pyjama days are listed, their contents sparse and empty, and it is these days Dianna remains as Léonard. Although in comparison to the rest they are days that virtually don’t exist, through them we are aware of the enduring existence of Léonard. He lives now when Dianna is fragile or in want of a day that is not dressed up. Interestingly, pyjama days have replaced Dianna’s photographs in their purpose; they are evidence of Léonard and they keep him alive. The balance has tipped.

We might compare Dianna’s situation and photographs to Roland Barthes’ discussion of André Kertész’s images. In Camera Lucida Barthes states, ‘…the editors of Life rejected Kertész’s photographs… in 1937 because, they said, his images “spoke too much”; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning – a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.’ Dianna’s photographs have always had the capacity to make us think with their volume, but she muted them as she muted her own identity due to societal fear and ignorance.

One of the most beautiful aspects of the representation of identity here is Marsman’s ability to completely allow co-authorship of Dianna’s story. His approach is without voyeurism or exploitation, and he recognises Dianna’s need to be seen and heard, instinctively allowing space for her to achieve this within the context of his own aspirations in making the work.  Marsman and Dianna are a gift to each other, and his awareness of this is clear and bright. As a result, her presence exudes in the book just as it does in life.

That Marsman has made this work is a sign of a shift forward, however slight, and however shameful that it has taken us so long. In Dianna’s introduction she states, ‘I could have done with today’s situation 40 years ago,’ and so we wonder how differently her life would have played out had it been so. It is only now, in the context of Marsman’s book, that we appreciate the life of Dianna and Léonard, and celebrate the photographs as they always should have been viewed, at their loudest volume.