Helen Maurene Cooper is a photographer who engages cultures and communities of women to find the intersection of race, class, and feminism.

The subject of her current work is drag queen, drag king, and trans communities photographed using 19th century technologies, as a way of completing an ignored ancestry for these communities.

Like her past series about the historic Weeki Wachee Mermaid show in Florida, and Chicago nail and prom cultures, Cooper has isolated specific currents of localized human behavior that reveal deep truths about our nature as socialized beings.