Transcend

Finalist for the 2025 Lucie Photo Book Prize in the Independent Category

The latest in the groundbreaking series of photobooks on LGBTQ life around the world, an intimate, personal collection of photographs on the queer community in the U.S.

Recent years have seen an unprecedented push by state legislatures to pass anti-LGBTQ bills across the United States. Hundreds of laws, mainly attempting to ban access to gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth and to ban discussions of gender identity and sexuality from high school curriculums, have been introduced this year alone—a new and deeply troubling record.

In these times visual representation of queer love is as important as it has ever been, and in Transcend, award-winning Taiwanese American photographer Sandra Chen Weinstein showcases some of the work from a long career of photographing the LGBTQ community, especially the trans community. Weinstein’s own child recently came out as queer, trans, and non-binary at the age of twenty-eight, and the core of the book is a series of photographs that focuses on their relationship.

A gorgeously packaged, full-color book, Transcend challenges many assumptions about LGBTQ life in the United States and is an enduring visual testament to the strength, resilience, and joy of the queer community in the face of discrimination, inequality, and violence.

Transcend was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).