Joseph B. Treaster

<h1>In early-20th-century France, when society generally considered women to be women and men to be men, Lucy Schwob decided she would rather be called Claude Cahun.</h1>

It was her way of protesting gender and sexual norms. She thrived on ambiguity and she chose a name, Claude, that in French could refer to either a man or a woman. She took the last name from her grandmother Mathilda Cahun.

Cahun (ca-AH) made ambiguity a theme in a lifelong exploration of gender and sexual identity as a writer and photographer. Decades after her death, she has a growing following among art historians, feminists and people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.

Working in Paris in the racy 1920s and ’30s alongside surrealist artists and writers, long before the rise of the gender-neutral “they” as a pronoun and the advent of terms like transgender and queer theory, Cahun created stark, sometimes playful, but deliberately equivocal photos of herself.

Here she’s a man. There she’s a woman. Sometimes she’s a little of both. Sometimes her head is shaved. In one photograph, Cahun brings together two silhouette portraits of herself, bald and austere, sizing each other up. “What do you want from me?” her caption reads.

“Masculine? Feminine?” she wrote in her book “Aveux non Avenus,” published in English as “Disavowals.” “It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

As writer and photographer, Cahun worked at upending convention. “My role,” she wrote in an essay published after her death, “was to embody my own revolt and to accept, at the proper moment, my destiny, whatever it may be.”

Cahun’s writing is complex and often difficult to follow, scholars say. But it provides context for the photographs and the weave of her life.

The photographs are by far her most compelling work. At first, scholars thought of them as self-portraits. But the gathering consensus is that Cahun choreographed and posed for the photos, and that her romantic partner, Marcel Moore, who was born Suzanne Malherbe, often pressed the button. It was a collaboration.

Cahun died on Dec. 8, 1954, at age 60, on the tiny Channel Island of Jersey off the Normandy coast of France. Hardly anyone noticed. “Disavowals,” her most heartfelt book, had not been well received. And she had never exhibited the photographs.

In the 1990s, however, she received a rush of attention as gender issues were gathering steam around the world. “Suddenly,” said Vince Aletti, a New York photography critic and curator, “she seemed incredibly of the moment.”

A French writer, François Leperlier, published a book on Cahun and helped organize the first exhibition of her work, at a museum in Paris. An English edition was published as “Claude Cahun: Masks and Metamorphoses.”

Professors and graduate students in art history and in feminist and gender studies began writing about her. Art museums wanted her work.

Cahun’s photographs have been displayed in group shows in the last two years in nearly a dozen museums in London, Paris, Washington, Melbourne, Warsaw and elsewhere. She is featured in a group exhibition running through early July at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Another group show opened in Bonn, Germany, in late May, and one opened in Sweden in mid-June.

Tellingly, many middle and high school students have attended the San Francisco exhibition, said Lori Starr, the museum’s director.

“In Cahun you’ve got an artist who turns the camera on themselves to see who else they can become,” said David J. Getsy, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who specializes in gender and sexuality in art. “Isn’t that what we’re all doing now with cellphone photos? This is one reason young people might see themselves in Cahun.”

Paris named a street for Cahun and Moore in 2018. That same year, Christian Dior brought out an androgynous collection inspired by Cahun.

Cahun’s art spoke to David Bowie, who was known for his shifting personas. He arranged a flashy, high-tech, outdoor presentation of her photographs in New York in 2007, telling reporters her work was “really quite mad, in the nicest possible way.”

Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob was born on Oct. 25, 1894, in Nantes, a provincial capital 200 miles southwest of Paris, to Maurice Schwob, the owner and publisher of the regional newspaper Le Phare de La Loire, and Victorine Mary-Antoinette Courbebaisse.

When she was 4, her mother began to show signs of mental illness and her grandmother took her in.

At 12, Lucy was sent to boarding school in England after French classmates began harassing her with anti-Semitic taunts. Back in Nantes at about 14 or 15, she met Suzanne Malherbe, who was two years older. The encounter, Cahun would write, was like a lightning strike.

Eight years later, Cahun’s father remarried. His new wife was Marie Eugénie Malherbe, Suzanne Malherbe’s mother. That made Cahun and Moore stepsisters, which created the appearance of a conventional relationship.

In Paris, they lived comfortably off family money. Drawing on her studies at the Sorbonne, Cahun wrote for literary magazines and journals, published at least two books and performed in experimental theater.

Moore worked as an illustrator and theatrical designer. Their apartment became a gathering place for writers and artists. They talked about social justice and debated communism as a counterforce to fascism. André Breton, a leader of the surrealist movement, wrote in a letter to Cahun in the early 1930s that she was “one of the most curious spirits of our time.”

Scholars are convinced that the choice of the name Claude Cahun was an important and symbolic expression of Cahun’s worldview. “It was not just a pen name,” said Jennifer L. Shaw, an art history professor at Sonoma State University in California and the author of a biography of Cahun. And yet Cahun and Moore usually called each other Lucy and Suzanne. Many friends and relatives also addressed them by those names.

In a similar separation between the intimate and the public, scholars say, the photographs were more part of a private conversation than something to present to the world.

“They were in the mode of investigation, who you could be, how you could be, projecting yourself into another skin, another universe,” said Tirza True Latimer, a professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, who first wrote about Cahun in her Ph.D. thesis nearly 20 years ago. “These were two lesbians living within certain constraints. The photographs, the acting out, were a way of being free. It wasn’t really about producing an art object.”

In 1937, with tension rising in prewar Paris, Cahun and Moore decamped for Jersey, where they bought a large granite house overlooking St. Brelade’s Bay.

When the Nazis rolled over France in 1940, they took Jersey and the other Channel Islands. Cahun and Moore fought back — with their typewriter and pens, writing short messages to the Germans under the guise of an unhappy soldier they called “the soldier with no name,” said Louise Downie, the director of curation at the Jersey Heritage Trust, which has the main collection of Cahun’s and Moore’s work.

The messages — written on small bits of paper, sometimes even toilet paper — said that the war was lost, that German troops should look out for themselves. They called Hitler a vampire. Whatever the soldiers’ commanders might say, one note read, “Nobody dies for us.”

They slipped the notes into uniform pockets at the laundry, under windshield wipers and into cigarette packs left on cafe tables, Val Nelson, the senior registrar at the Jersey trust, said.

It was a small-scale effort, with serious consequences. Cahun and Moore had a suicide plan and carried barbiturates. After three years they were caught and sentenced to death. Twice, they tried to kill themselves but underdosed. The war ended and they went free.

Cahun died nine years later and was buried in the churchyard next to their house. Moore took her own life 18 years after that. They are now together under a single gravestone inscribed with two stars of David and their birth names.

Why they did not put Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore on the tombstone — or use them in their handwritten wills — is a mystery. There are no clues at the Jersey trust.

But whatever their reasoning, Cahun and Moore remain symbols of how people can break free of society’s preconceptions.

“Their lives were a performance around the questioning of identity,” said Jonathan Carter, the chief executive of the Jersey trust.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/obituaries/claude-cahun-overlooked.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Overlooked No More: Claude Cahun, whose photographs explored gender and sexuality

Cahun (ca-AH) made ambiguity a theme in a lifelong exploration of gender and sexual identity as a writer and photographer. Decades after her death, she has a growing following among art historians, feminists and people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.

<h1>MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Mitchell Kaplan remembers Lundy’s market with the kosher butcher shop, Friedman’s Bakery and the art deco synagogue down the street. He remembers the Yiddish in the air. He remembers the deli-grocery where he picked up a sesame bagel with cream cheese on the way to school.</h1>

Back then, everyone on South Beach — the southern tip of Miami Beach — was much older. “They were all like my grandparents,” Kaplan said the other day.

It was the late 1970s, the beginning of the ‘80s, and South Beach was a Jewish retirement village, a tropical shtetl, some people called it, a shtetl with palm trees. “It was so Jewish, I thought everybody in the world was Jewish,” said Kaplan, who grew up on South Beach, started the independent bookstore Books &amp; Books, and was a founder of the Miami Book Fair.

It was a world that vaporized as developers poured money into South Beach, turned it into a flashy, artsy American Riviera. Friedman’s bakery is an Argentine fast-food place now. The synagogue is a museum.

But two young photographers made a project of capturing life in the South Beach shtetl, and their work has been revived in a new book of photography, “Shtetl in the Sun,” and a documentary film, “The Last Resort,” which is being shown in theaters around the country.

“Shtetl in the Sun,” is filled with photos by Andy Sweet, cherubic, always smiling, every bubbe’s darling. He shot in color with a Hasselblad. His photography partner, Gary Monroe, used a Leica. He worked in black and white. In the documentary, photos, reminiscences of Kaplan and others, archival footage and video of South Beach today tell the story of the shtetl with palm trees and its passing.

The photographers developed different styles — Sweet more casual, catching scenes as if by chance; Monroe, more meticulous, more concerned about structure. Their photographs exude warmth and empathy. They bring to mind Diane Arbus — without the weirdness — and Robert Frank. Sweet admired William Eggleston. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Garry Winogrand were models for Monroe, who went on to photograph around the world, write books, curate museum exhibitions and teach photography.

The camera is often looking into people’s faces: Ordinary people doing ordinary things — sitting in a folding plastic chair on an art deco hotel porch, walking along a sun-bleached, nearly empty boulevard.

The faces are soulful, ambiguous. Sad, but not terminally sad. Happy but not endlessly happy. Sometimes it looks like resignation, or maybe weariness, or longing. A man in a powder blue sport coat looks annoyed. “Yeah, what about it?” his tight face seems to be saying.

One black-and-white shot cuts across a man’s torso and forearms, one arm scarred with a concentration camp tattoo. In another photograph, three women in a party crowd seem alone and isolated, even from each other, absorbed in grave thoughts. A little distance behind them and unawares, a man in a checked sport coat and pointed paper hat beams into the camera.

The life they were living had been decades in the making. They were working-class New Yorkers, people from other cold places, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston; Holocaust survivors. They had ended up with little money. Miami Beach had drifted out of favor with tourists. Frank Sinatra and his crew and Jackie Gleason were gone. The art deco hotels were getting ragged and renting for almost nothing.

But there was plenty of sunshine, and always a nice breeze riffling the palm fronds. They played cards and mah-jongg and shuffleboard on big concrete courts and danced at parties, lots of parties.

“What could be better?” says a man in an unbuttoned blue dress shirt in some vintage footage.

But people missed their families up north, their children, their grandchildren. “Fun?” one deeply tanned woman says into the video camera. “Nothing. I sit on the porch. This is my fun.” A woman in a sleeveless, knit, aqua blouse says, “Some of these parents have not heard from their children in years.”

The book and the film might never have been possible if not for a burst of luck after several calamities. On Oct. 16, 1982, Sweet was murdered in his apartment not far from South Beach, stabbed 27 times. Three men were implicated. One went to prison. Sweet may have known them. Cocaine and sex may have been factors. “It was really never that clear,” his older sister, Ellen Sweet Moss, says in the film.

Sweet’s family entrusted thousands of his South Beach negatives to an art storage company. Somehow everything was lost. Then Stan Hughes, the partner of Sweet’s sister, took a stack of comics one day to the family’s household storage locker. As he was leaving, his eyes fell on some long, flat boxes. One label read: “Work Prints 371- 440, Roll #5.”

Hughes had stumbled upon work the family hadn’t known existed, hundreds of Sweet’s rough work prints, contact sheets and even some big, finished prints. Many were badly faded. Hughes, who had taught animation and Photoshop to college students in Chicago, spent the next 10 years, off and on, restoring the photos. Sweet Moss put some on Facebook and, two years ago, they became the inspiration for the book and the film.

By chance, Sweet’s path in life meandered close to Kaplan’s. They were a year apart at Miami Beach Senior High School. Sweet was on the school newspaper. “I remember him always with a camera around his neck,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan graduated from the University of Colorado. Sweet and Monroe went there for MFA degrees. In 1982, a few months before Sweet’s murder, Kaplan opened Books &amp; Books. Two years later, the Book Fair debuted.

“Andy was such a talent,” Kaplan said. “So many things could have been.”

Brett Sokol, a contributor to The New York Times and arts editor of Ocean Drive magazine, and Francesco Casale, a photographer and graphic designer, published “Shtetl in the Sun,” at their nonprofit Letter16 Press.

Dennis Scholl, one of two directors of “The Last Resort,” said he originally thought the film was going to be mostly about Sweet and Monroe and a little about the Jewish community on South Beach. But, he added, “the reverse turned out to be true.”

The film had an initial run in New York at the turn of the year. “After the shows in New York,” said Kareem Tabsch, the film’s other director, “we asked people, ‘How many of you have relatives who spent time in South Beach in the 1970s and early ‘80s?' ”

“Half the audience,” he said, “raised their hands.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="ef469adf-7116-4c3a-9900-3b4fc64b930a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/arts/design/shtetl-in-the-sun-south-beach.html">The New York Times</a>.

In the viewfinder, a tropical shtetl's glory days

Back then, everyone on South Beach — the southern tip of Miami Beach — was much older. “They were all like my grandparents,” Kaplan said the other day.

Brett Sokol, a contributor to The New York Times and arts editor of Ocean Drive, and Francesco Casale, a photographer and graphic designer, published “Shtetl in the Sun,” at their nonprofit Letter16.

The film had an initial run in New York at the turn of the year. “After the shows in New York,” said Kareem Tabsch, the film’s other director, “we asked people, ‘How many of you have relatives who spent time in South Beach in the 1970s and early ‘80s?’ ”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/arts/design/shtetl-in-the-sun-south-beach.html" id="e8c8abf5-c659-356f-abed-515e90875cc2">The New York Times</a>.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Mitchell Kaplan remembers Lundy’s market with the kosher butcher shop, Friedman’s Bakery and the art deco synagogue down the street. He remembers the Yiddish in the air. He remembers the deli-grocery where he picked up a sesame bagel with cream cheese on the way to school.

In the Viewfinder, a Tropical Shtetl's Glory Days

His death, following surgery in a military hospital, was confirmed by Carlos Roberto Flores, a former president of Honduras and a former chief of staff to Suazo Córdova.

Suazo Córdova was the first civilian president of Honduras after nearly a decade of military rule in a Central American country that had been dominated by the military through most of its history.

But his authority was limited. The commander of the armed forces, Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, remained the most powerful figure in Honduras, inviting the United States to train and arm anti-Nicaraguan government forces — known as the Contras — on Honduran soil and serving as the point man for U.S. officials as they poured tens of millions of dollars into defeating the communists in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Still, Suazo Córdova came to symbolize an overeager embrace of U.S. political ambitions in a country where Washington and U.S. companies had often called the shots.

“He completely and willingly did everything the Americans wanted,” said Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, a historian, former minister of culture and a presidential candidate in Honduras in the early 1990s.

Suazo Córdova’s main accomplishment, some Americans and Hondurans said, may have been to hold together a nominally civilian government and turn over the presidency to another civilian. In its 161 years of independence before Suazo Córdova took office, Honduras had endured 385 armed rebellions, 126 governments and 16 constitutions.

“There was always a lot of apprehension, mistrust between the military and the politicians,” said Flores, who was president of Honduras from 1998 to 2002 and is now an owner of a company that runs the newspapers La Tribuna and El País and a television station. “It was a hard transition.”

It was late in the Cold War when Suazo Córdova became president, in 1982. Washington saw allies of the Soviet Union advancing in Latin America. Suazo Córdova and Álvarez worried that communism could spread to Honduras, a country the size of Tennessee with a population of about 4 million. The Americans and Hondurans wanted to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and help the government in El Salvador defeat leftist guerrillas.

Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died in the fighting before the United States abandoned its campaign against the Sandinistas and the warring sides in El Salvador agreed to a truce. Scores of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed as political enemies. Human rights groups accused Álvarez of directing death squads.

When the U.S. Congress cut funding to the Contras, the Reagan administration raised money by illegally selling weapons to Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

Suazo Córdova loudly proclaimed his animosity toward communism and several times met with President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush in Washington. Reagan stopped briefly on a Central America trip to talk with Suazo Córdova in Honduras, and Bush once went to see him at his home in the small farm town of La Paz, northwest of the capital.

The military is still perhaps the most powerful institution in Honduras; it stepped in to depose President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Six civilian presidents had followed Suazo Córdova into office. Since the coup, two more civilians have been elected, one for a second term.

Suazo Córdova did not aspire to lofty social goals, former U.S. and Honduran officials said. Nor did he leave much of a mark on the many social problems that had become deeply woven into the life of one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, now struggling with one of the highest murder rates in the world.

As a politician, Suazo Córdova played up his rural origins, often wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He had a playful, rough-edged and disarming way of talking, said Cresencio S. Arcos Jr., a U.S. diplomat who worked closely with him in the early 1980s and was ambassador to Honduras from 1989 to 1993.

But, Arcos said, Suazo Córdova had a steely core. In early 1984 he sided with dissident military officers who had put a gun to Álvarez’s head and shipped him out of the country. Suazo Córdova was the godfather of a child of the coup leader, Col. Walter Lopez Reyes of the air force.

Later, friends of Álvarez tried to assassinate Suazo Córdova. The FBI discovered the plot in Miami. Ultimately, Álvarez’s former chief of staff, an arms dealer he had befriended, and several others were sent to prison. The plot, investigators said, was going to be financed from the sale of cocaine smuggled into Florida. Álvarez returned to Honduras and was killed in 1989 in an ambush near his home in the capital.

In December 1982, a daughter of Suazo Córdova’s, Dr. Judith Xiomara Suazo Estrada, then 33, was kidnapped by guerrillas in Guatemala, held for 10 days and released after Guatemala and more than a dozen Latin American newspapers agreed to publish a statement by the guerrillas describing Honduras as the “imperialist headquarters for the invasion of Nicaragua.” The guerrillas referred to Suazo Córdova as “the buffoon of the imperialist plans.”

Suazo Cordova suffered a heart attack in the summer of 1983, when he was 55. He was treated at a U.S. field hospital in Honduras and then flown by the United States to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, according to John Negroponte, who worked closely with Suazo Cordova as the U.S. ambassador in Honduras from 1981, just before Suazo Cordova was elected, until 1985. (Critics of U.S. policy in Honduras often focused on Negroponte. They sometimes referred to him derogatorily as the proconsul and as the third member of a ruling triumvirate.)

Suazo Cordova had once been a hard drinker. “When I first met him,” Negroponte said, “He would tell you he hadn’t had a drink for years and he would tell you the day he stopped and how long it had been since then.”

Roberto Suazo Córdova was born in La Paz on March 17, 1927, the youngest of five children of Julian Suazo and Matilde Cordova. His father owned a small farm and was governor of the province of La Paz in the 1930s.

Suazo Córdova had six children with four women, said Jorge Canahuati, chief executive of a company that publishes the newspapers Diario La Prensa and Diario El Heraldo. Besides his daughter Dr. Suazo Estrada, his survivors include three other children, Joseph Julian Suazo Cervantes, Socorro Maria Suazo Cervantes and Carmen Chavarria.

Suazo Córdova graduated in 1949 from a combined undergraduate and medical program at the University of San Carlos of Guatemala. He worked in a hospital in Guatemala City for four years, then went home to practice medicine for 25 years in La Paz and begin his career as a politician.

Suazo Córdova served several terms in Congress and three times helped rewrite the constitution. Under pressure from Washington and some Honduran business leaders, the military agreed to permit elections in 1981. Suazo Córdova had become the protégé of the leader of the Liberal Party, Modesto Rodas Alvarado.

After Rodas died in 1979, Suazo Córdova became the party’s leader and, later, its presidential candidate. Suazo Córdova won the election in 1981 with 53 percent of the vote.

Toward the end of his presidency 32 years ago, Suazo Córdova maneuvered to get another two years in office. The idea was rejected, and he eventually lost the leadership of the Liberal Party.

He went home to La Paz to tend his small dairy farm. At one point he persuaded the government to renovate a building in La Paz as a cultural center. But he never again ventured into national politics.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/obituaries/roberto-suazo-cordova-dies-at-91.html" id="c043b192-a5f8-3b5e-a0a4-0affb1e2309e">The New York Times</a>.

Roberto Suazo Córdova, a country doctor who was president of Honduras in the 1980s as the country was becoming the main U.S. base for proxy wars in neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador, died Saturday in Tegucigalpa, the capital. He was 91.

Roberto Suazo Córdova, Ex-President of Honduras, Dies at 91

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Joseph B. Treaster

Articles written by the author

Overlooked No More: Claude Cahun, whose photographs explored gender and sexuality

In the viewfinder, a tropical shtetl's glory days

In the Viewfinder, a Tropical Shtetl's Glory Days

Roberto Suazo Córdova, Ex-President of Honduras, Dies at 91