Photographer Vivienne Blum (a.k.a. Remsen Wolff)

Vivienne Blum was born in 1940 to parents Isabel Bishop and Harold Wolff. She was raised in the manner of boys, attending Phillips Exeter Academy (a preparatory boarding school) and Harvard University. She married Lucy Webber in 1962 and in time the couple had two daughters. Their marriage announcement mentions plans to move to Albuquerque, New Mexico but it's unclear if this ever happened. In 1968 Lucy sued for divorce citing "cruel and abusive treatment". Standard terms for the times — no fault divorce wouldn't come to Massachusetts until 1975.

The record loses track of Blum for a while — she appears to have moved around. A 1973 legal posting (Lucy, suing for a modification to the divorce decree) mentions residency in both New York and California. A 1975 newspaper ad indicates she maintained a portrait/modeling studio in Agawam, a Springfield, MA suburb/exurb. The address for the studio reveals a then five year old modest two story garden apartment complex renting studios, one bedrooms, and two bedrooms. In 1980 she had a photography showing in the Northampton, MA city library.

The record catches back up with Blum in 1985, when she's arrested under suspicion of committing a series of rapes and murders in Forth Worth, TX. Police were tipped off by a Channel 4 TV news reporter who, in turn, was tipped off by a source who appears to have remained anonymous. Police found no evidence of wrongdoing and released Blum, but not before the news station ran sensationalistic coverage implicating her in the crime.

Two years earlier Blum had been accused of child abuse — a case the grand jury accepted for trial but that languished in the docket waiting for a court date. The DA never went forward with the trial for this second accusation. The charges were eventually dropped, an assistant DA citing lack of reliable evidence and an inability to make the case.

It's always difficult encountering these accusations in the record, knowing how often child sexual abuse is swept under the rug. However, in a 1985 rife with both satanic and stranger danger moral panics, in a Texas culture suspicious of outsiders and any sniff of queerness, and with religious and political operators casting any homosexual as a child predator, it's easy to see how Blum, with few roots in the community, came under suspicion.

Channel 4 would come to regret its role in, and sensationalistic reporting of, Blum's arrest. In 1986 she sued the station seeking $10,000,000 in damages. The available record makes no mention of this lawsuit beyond its start, but press for Blum's posthumous shows make mention of a million dollar settlement.

Whether it was this settlement, or the inheriting of her mother's estate (Bishop passed in 1988), Blum was able to spend the rest of hey days working on her art. She traveled between New York City and Amsterdam, meeting and hiring members of the local gay and trans nightlife scenes as models. As she met the drag queens, trans women, and gender outlaws of the '90s she referred to herself as a "fake" transsexual. Towards the end of the '90s she took on the name Vivienne Blum.

Where she might have gone after that is lost of us. She passed in 1998 from a morphine overdose — a possible suicide in the face of a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. She left her archive and part of her estate ("a bag of money") to her assistant, Jochem Brouwer and charged him with publishing her work. Brouwer took full possession of the archive and inheritance in 2001 after a challenge by Blum's daughters. The body of work failed to garner interest until 2019 when Lecturis published a modest 34 plate photo art book, All American Girls, and again in 2020 when the Foam Gallery in Amsterdam hosted a showing of Amsterdam Girls. Her work's slated to appear this spring in New York at the Photoville Festival, and in a forthcoming book In the Name of Viv Blum.

Notes

I'm finding myself, more and more, frustrated by the limitations of this historian as hobby practice I've created for myself. There's deeper research I would have liked to do here, but that would have meant access to court records, time with the non-OCR'd Bishop archives, travel to non-digitized archives, and the time to build relationships and interview people.

Also, related, it's wild how often the press just says things that aren't true. Details of the trouble in Texas were often misreported, especially by the art press. Even Brouwer, one of the few people she considered friend, says ambiguous things

his queer and gender identity were a true struggle for him and he was a loner. He was in his forties when he came out of the closet – he had a wife and two daughters at the time

Came out of the closet as what? And "had a wife and daughter at the time". Blum's forties would have started in the 1980s, long after her divorce in 1968. Were Lucy and her daughters still a part of Blum's life, or did Brouwer only have part of the picture? Or did the article's author simply misrepresent a longer quote.

The work itself is striking — both as portrait photography as well as a window into a now historic period. No dominant portrait style emerges — the art press often emphasizes Blum giving models broad license to chose how they're portrayed.

The posthumous management of an artist's body of work ends up being a collaboration of the dead with the living. The All American Girls book contains prints that Blum chose to make. The Amsterdam Girls show contains a selection of vintage prints as well as newly made ones. Regardless of their provenance, the specific prints chosen tell the story that others want to tell about the work and Blum herself. That story can leave a modern trans audience wanting.

Models range from luminaries of the New York City drag scene like Constance Cooper and Clare Scandelle, glam queens like Miss Guy Furrow, and Club Kid Amanda Lepore. There's also a handful of now-anonymous women identified only by a single names like Julie, or Georgina & Katterin.

The back of All American Girls describes itself with the awkward phrasing (of either the cis or the non-native english speaker) as "a selection the transvestites, transsexuals, and transgenders, lovingly photographed". The estate positions Blum as a documentarian who will guide you, the cis viewer, through the wild world of the '90s gender variance. Her own gender position penned in as fluid as best, or struggling and mentally ill at worst. The name she eventually chose for herself is mostly ignored, and sometimes described as fictitious.

Which is, I suppose, a point of view. However, when I look at what little of her life's been presented — rejection of marriage, drifting and keeping to herself, the slow embrace of depression and agoraphobia, magnetism towards the transfeminine communities of the '90s — it's easy to see a trans women on the verge of accepting herself but pulling back. Pulling back from fear of the unknown in the days before informed consent, before the settling on bioidentical hormones, and before the mainstreaming of certain styles of queer life.

Easy to see and an uncomfortable reminder of how things used to be.

To their credit those sculpting Blum's posthumous image seem aware of the need to include trans points of view — the Foam Gallery pulled together a round table of trans writers and thinkers to discuss Blum's work. While not without merit, it does play out like a parody of old Tumblr discourse: A cis woman, two trans guys, and a trans masc non-binary walk into a bar, etc. No one transfeminine on the panel, and the discussion is weaker for it.

Of course — the state Blum found herself in isn't a place many trans women like returning to, and her situation is lost history to the truly young. Some are outright hostile to it — when Foam announced their gallery show on Facebook the comments included this from a young trans woman

but also this is a photographer that considered himself a 'faux transsexual' and also 'developed a fascination for transgender individuals' (info found on his website). can we please NOT use CISGENDER photographers who fetishize trans women and being transgender in general??? this is offensive, very disrespectful.

A knee jerk response and an inability to see Blum — or Foam's framing of her work — as more than a chaser. A refined version of the old Craigslist "Guy With Camera" from the aughts.

Less harsh versions of this distance exist. Some valorize the struggle as having had wanted it enough, which doesn't leave room for doubters like Blum. Still others may have empathy or sympathy — but over time the emotional attention one has to spend lingering in the landscape of these desert years flags. I find myself feeling several ways about this distance rising in myself — understanding why so few people tried tapping me on the shoulder and pointing me in the right direction.

Gender things aside, I hope this collection gets its due. The archive boasts over 200,000 negatives and it would be a shame if only the most renowned figures or the most sellable of the images were the ones that surfaced.