Mark Seliger is best known for his photographs of celebrities. From 1992-2002, he was chief photographer for Rolling Stone. His portraits have also appeared in such publications as Vanity Fair, GQ, and Esquire. Chances are good you’d recognize some of the photographs he’s taken. Chances are even better you would recognize their subjects.
There’s no one famous in “On Christopher Street: Transgender Portraits by Mark Seliger,” except in the sense that a person is famous to those who love and cherish them. Not famous is different, though, from not memorable and not vivid. The show runs through Sept. 8 at the Gardner Museum, as does a related exhibition, “Portraits From Boston, With Love.”
Can a thoroughfare be storied? If it can, then Christopher Street is. It’s in New York’s West Village, Seliger’s longtime neighborhood. “I’ve always been intrigued by the life and theatre of Christopher Street,” he writes in the 2016 book that inspired the exhibition.
“I’ve noticed the photographic possibility out of the corner of my eye for the past couple of decades — an Ellis Island for freedom of expression and gender identity.” “Ellis Island” isn’t hyperbole. Christopher Street was the location of the original Stonewall Inn, the raiding of which by New York police set off the Stonewall riots, in 1969, widely considered the founding moment of the gay liberation movement.
In a curatorial grace note, the wall text for “On Christopher Street” is in Marsha, a font derived from a sign that hung outside the Stonewall. The Gardner’s Adrienne Chaparro curated both the Seliger show and “Portraits From Boston, With Love.”
Starting in 2013, Seliger began asking transgender people he met on Christopher Street to pose for him. “At first I didn’t even realize I was shooting trans stories,” he writes, “just stories of people who found their way to Christopher Street.”
Thirty-two of the portraits are in the show, as are three contact sheets and a 20-minute film Seliger directed, “Christopher Street Stories.” It plays on a loop in the gallery.
That word, stories, is important. These are excellent portraits, qua portraits. They’re in black-and-white and large — most of them either 3 feet square or 22 inches by 26 inches. Without exception, they’re very handsome. Seliger really knows his business (no surprise there). What adds a whole other dimension are the wall texts accompanying most of them, which consist of the subjects’ own words.
As much as any successful portrait owes to the photographer’s skill, it owes even more to the trust photographer and subject share. The openness of Seliger’s sitters testifies to that trust. And what they’ve told him enriches, deepens, and personalizes the images in ways their handsomeness alone never could.
“We’re sisters and we’re both trans,” Angel Castillo says of her and her sibling, Ally. “Imagine that! We’re very proud of it. We inspire each other and we’ve been great support for each other, which is really important for someone transitioning, specially for one’s mental health.”
Or there’s Carmen Carrera: “I’m still the same person my family raised, and they love me and respect that fact that I’ve made something of myself, but I have met so many people who don’t have that.”
Most of the photographs were taken at night or dusk, which lends an atmospheric touch. Seliger usually took them on the sidewalk, but occasionally inside. He photographed over the course of three summers. That combination of nighttime, outdoors, and warm temperatures adds to the overall sense of shared urban fabric. Even if you didn’t know this was Seliger’s own neighborhood, you’d likely sense it.
“Portraits From Boston, With Love” features the work of local artists Jaypix Belmer, Ally Schmaling, and Olivia Slaughter.
Belmer’s seven photographs are self-portraits, with a twist. Jaypix, which is how Belmer identifies, portrays a character named Gold Member. Spray-painted that color, Gold Member looks at once comic and sinister and slightly inhuman. That’s quite a trifecta.
Schmaling’s 14 photographs are garishly colored, like very large postcards from a highly toxic Candy Land. Four are of geometric shapes, the rest of people. Oddly, the shapes feel more natural. With the people, it’s the colors that catch the eye rather than the individuals they’re superimposed on.
Those colors make for an almost mind-bending contrast with the very deep blacks of Slaughter’s seven photographs. Within lozenge-shaped frames — themselves hung in a lozenge-shaped array — Slaughter offers an often-startling variation and themes on 19th-century silhouettes and the work of Kara Walker.
The latest commission for the Gardner Evans Way facade is Hakeem Adewumi’s “Possession of a Recalcitrant Dream.” Titles don’t come any better. It’s a digital photo collage that’s part self-portrait, the lower half, and part conjuring of Greek mythology, specifically the Hydra. Oddly enough, it also bears a resemblance to the poster for the original Broadway production of “The Wiz.” Recalcitrance would seem not to extend to easing on down Evans Way.
ON CHRISTOPHER STREET. Transgender Portraits by Mark Seliger
PORTRAITS FROM BOSTON, WITH LOVE
HAKEEM ADEWUMI: POSSESSION OF A RECALCITRANT DREAM, 2024
At Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way, through Sept. 8 (“Possession” through Oct. 1). 617-566-1401, www.gardnermuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.
