TRUDY ROSEN

ROSEN--Trudy (Trix). Trudy Jane Rosen, known professionally and to her friends as Trix Rosen, died on July 11, 2021 in Paramus, NJ at the age of 74. The cause was multiple system atrophy. Trix Rosen was a dauntless photographer of New York City's feminist/gay scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Her photographs from that era were memorialized in a slide show titled Maitresse, featured in the 2017 MOMA exhibition on Club 57. The exhibit, subtitled "Film, Performance and Art in the East Village -- 1978-1983," examined the life of downtown New York's fabled post-punk alternative culture. During that period, Rosen's loft on Broadway and 11th Street became a mecca for friends far and wide, and the site of some extraordinary photo shoots, legendary parties, and endless topical conversations that pushed all the boundaries of art, sex, and politics. The portraits of Rosen's female friends from the 1970s and 1980s document the emerging feminist movement in New York and the growing power of gay liberation. Rosen became known in particular for her work exploring gender fluidity and identity within the LGBTQ community. Her HE-SHE portfolio records 20 years of photographing French performance artist Fred Koenig. Rosen's decades-long career went on to embrace the fields of fine-art photography, photojournalism, portraiture, and historic architectural preservation. In the early 1980s she worked for WNBC-TV Live at Five and News4NY in New York, shooting photo-essays reported by Chauncey Howell. She periodically lived in the Philippines, where she focused her work in the northern indigenous Cordillera region and on the radical transformation of the tribal villages of the Kalinga people. This work culminated in her book A Kalinga Journey through Time. Rosen also helped develop the award-winning InSIGHT- OUT! Storytelling Project based in Bangkok, which teaches visual storytelling to disadvantaged participants, empowering them with the skills to document their lives. She taught this program to teenagers in the Bronx, indigenous youth in the Philippines, young tsunami survivors in Thailand and Indonesia, and gay, lesbian, and transgender community members in Jersey City. Over the years, Rosen's photos were featured in exhibits around the world, including in recent shows at the Jewish Institute of Religion Museum at Hebrew Union College in New York. A memorial service will be scheduled later this year.