In April 2014, Luisa Dörr was on assignment to photograph the Young Miss Brazil contest. There, she noticed Maysa Martins, an 11-year-old in the crowd. Maysa told Dörr that she hoped, one day, to be Miss Brazil. But her aspiration came with a catch. The competition was divided into two categories: one for white contestants, and another for people of color. Though around 50 percent of Brazilians identify as "black" or "mixed race," racism remains prevalent throughout the country. A few months after Young Miss Brazil, Maysa's mother contacted Dörr, asking if she'd shoot her daughter's personal modeling portfolio. Dörr agreed to do it for free. Six months later, Maysa was crowned Young Miss São Paulo Black Beauty, winning a separate and smaller local pageant with the same racial divisions as Young Miss Brazil. Unfortunately, the nationwide tournament's creator disappeared, and it ceased to exist. But in 2017, Maysa was invited onto a Brazilian television program to walk the runaway in front of a live jury. She received a modeling contract and the chance to tell her story.
When Sage Sohier began photographing gay and lesbian couples in the mid 1980s, she had a personal connection to the topic: Her dad, a World War II veteran and a lawyer, had divorced her mother but never remarried, and soon young men—usually introduced as "colleagues from work"—replaced the young women who occasionally accompanied him. Sohier figured out that her dad was gay in the mid 1970s. From middle age on, he had a number of live-in boyfriends, but he never "came out"—even to his family. Originally published in 2014, At Home with Themselves: Same-Sex Couples in 1980s America, Sohier's intimate, portraits of committed same-sex couples during the AIDS epidemic, does not conform to the stereotypes of gay promiscuity prevalent in that era. Sohier says that it was her "ambition to make pictures that challenged and moved." Here, for the first time, are some photographs that were not included in her book.
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