Category: queer history

Alvin Baltrop

The Photography of Alvin Baltrop

Born in Bronx borough of New York in December of 1948, Alvin Baltrop was a working-class American photographer who extensively documented the dilapidated Hudson River piers and New York City’s clandestine gay culture during the 1970s and 1980s. 

Alvin Baltrop was the younger son of Dorothy Mae Baltrop who had moved from Virginia to the Bronx with her eldest son James. He discovered photography while attending junior high school and began photographing with a twin-lens Yashica camera. Baltrop studied under the older photographers in his neighborhood and taught himself the techniques of film development. During the Vietnam War, he enlisted in 1969 as a medic in the U.S. Navy and photographed his fellow crew members. After his military service ended in 1972 with an honorable discharge, Baltrop returned to New York City where he worked in a variety of odd jobs, including as a street vendor and cab driver.

In December of 1973, a truck laden with asphalt crashed through Manhattan’s elevated West Side Highway between West Twelfth and Gansevoort Streets and forever closed that section of highway to the south. The abandoned and dilapidated Hudson River piers to the west of the closed highway presented opportunities both as art platforms and meeting places. Fifteen years elapsed before the elevated structure was fully dismantled; the location served during this time as a major New York experimental art and social venue.  

In 1973, Alvin Baltrop enrolled in the School of Visual Arts where he studied photography until 1975. Interested in photographing the Hudson River piers, he became a self-employed mover of household furniture and belongings, work that allowed him to spend more time with his photography. Although initially terrified of the area, Baltrop constantly photographed the West Side piers from 1975 to 1986, particularly those piers that bordered Greenwich Village starting at the meatpacking district and extending south to Christopher Street. 

Baltrop often shot images at the piers for several days and lived inside his moving van parked nearby. Capturing both the personalities and the structure of the piers, he became a well-known member of its artistic and gay community and remembered every person he photographed. Baltrop eventually became established as both friend and confidant to many of those who frequented the pier areas. 

Although his work had both documentary and aesthetic value, Baltrop had great difficulty in finding a gallery to sponsor an exhibition of his work during his lifetime. In 1977, he had a small solo show at the Glines, a non-profit gay art organization best known for producing Harvey Fierstein’s 1982 “Torch Song Trilogy”. Baltrop also had an exhibition of his “Pier” series at an East Village gay bar where he occasionally was employed as a bouncer. However, the established photography galleries, even those that presented explicit homoerotic work, were unreceptive to Baltrop’s work.

As a result, Alvin Baltrop never gained the finances necessary to print the vast majority of his thousands of negatives or to properly care for those he managed to print. The majority of his printed photographs are small, approximately 13 x 18 centimeters (5 x 7 inches), however, he did print a few larger images. His photographs of the Hudson River pier area  constitute a significant record of a lost era of New York City’s industrial landscape and the gay culture’s pre-AIDS history. While his photography was documentary in nature, its studied compositions, intimacy, and the attention to both light and shadow attest to an artistic ambition.

Baltrop was befriended by the New York City glass artist and writer John Drury in the late 1990s. Drury, who recognized Baltrop’s  photographic abilities, nominated him for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award for the Arts. Baltrop received a diagnosis of cancer in the 1990s, a time when he was impoverished and without insurance for care. After only a few exhibitions during decades of photographic work, Alvin Baltrop passed away due to complications from cancer and diabetes at the age of fifty-five in New York City on the first day of February in 2004. 

In 2012, a retrospective solo exhibition entitled “Perspectives 179-Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass”, which included almost one hundred gelatin silver prints, was held at Houston’s  Contemporary Art Museum. New York’s Bronx Museum of Art, custodian of many Baltrop photographs and negatives, held a 2019 retrospective of his work, entitled “The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop”, that included works from Baltrop’s private archive never before viewed by the public. 

Alvin Baltrop’s work has also been included in several exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art including its 2015 “America is Hard to See”, 2016-2017 “Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection”, 2020 “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970-1986” and the 2024 “Trust Me”, an exhibition of intergenerational artists.

Unless noted otherwise, all photographs in this article are used courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust, @ 2010, The Alvin Baltrop Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS) and Galerie Bucholz, New York. All rights reserved. 

Notes: New York’s Museum of Modern Art has an article on Alvin Baltrop, along with several images from its collection, on its website at: https://www.moma.org/artists/48461-alvin-baltrop

An extensive biography of Alvin Baltrop, composed by the Alvin Baltrop Trust and drawn from audio recordings and interviews, can be found at the global strategic-consultancy Third Streaming site located at: http://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-biography

Issue 4 of GAYLETTER Magazine has a short biography on the life of Alvin Baltrop written by Chris Stewart entitled “Alvin Baltrop’s Days on the Piers” located at: https://gayletter.com/alvin-baltrops-days-on-the-piers/

PIN-UP magazine has an article by Alejandro Carrion entitled “Masculinity Under Construction” that discusses, among other artists, the Hudson River pier area and Alvin Baltrop’s photography at: https://www.pinupmagazine.org/articles/sexy-construction-workers-urban-homoeroticism

Top Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “Self Portrait with Alice”, 1975, Ektachrome Slide, The Alvin Baltrop Trust

Second Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers ( Sunbathing Platform with Tava Mural)”, 1976-1985, Gelatin Silver Print, The Alvin Baltrop Trust 

Third Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers (Two Men)”, 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Three Sunbathers), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 35  cm, Printed 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Male Portrait), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, and The Alvin Baltrop Trust 

Kyle Dunn

The Artwork of Kyle Dunn

Born in 1990, Kyle Dunn is an American artist who creates sensuous and psychologically complex scenes on canvas and panels. His work is a meld of theatrical elements and personal introspection that explores those relationships between the artist and his subject, two people in love, and the individual and society. 

Kyle Dunn received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in 2012 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A modernist with a classical style, he began his career as a painter with a prolific series of images on canvas. In 2016, Dunn returned to his sculptural roots and created a visual language that employed three-dimensional elements constructed of epoxy resin, plaster and relief foam panels.

Dunn’s domestic tableaux and still lifes are staged, highly stylized images that include trompe l’oeil and bas-relief. All of his paintings contain a wealth of detail; your attention is drawn to the many thoughtfully placed objects that fill the canvas and surround its protagonists. Within Dunn’s melodramatic scenes, figures are staged in a variety of positions and activities that are open to the viewers’ own interpretations. His figures are often presented in solitary moments of self-reflection or scenes of domestic intimacy. 

The lighting of each scene is an important component of Kyle Dunn’s work; the theatric lighting style of both horror and noir films is evident in his paintings. In many of Dunn’s paintings and bas-relief works, light comes from a strong, external source, located either from above or below, or the side through a window or open doorway. Blocks of sunlight flood into rooms in such images as “Hyacinth and Pears” and “Devil in the Daytime”. Scenes, such as “Midday” and “Downward Dog” present  strong contrasts between light and shadow, an effect that highlights the scene’s subject and increases the drama of the depicted moment.

Kyle Dunn’s work was included in the 2022 “Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from the ICA Miami’s Collection”, an exhibition of work housed by Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art. His most recent exhibitions include a series of colorful nocturnal scenes in a successful April/May 2023 solo exhibition, entitled “Night Pictures”, at New York City’s  P.P.O.W. gallery on Broadway. In June of 2024, Dunn had a solo institutional show, entitled “Matrix 194”, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival structure in Connecticut. His solo exhibition “Devil in the Daytime” is currently on view from February 8th to March 29th in 2025 at the Vielmetter Gallery in Los Angeles. 

Dunn has shown work in many international venues including the Marlborough Gallery in London, Amsterdam’s GRIMM gallery, the Maria Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, and Berlin’s Galerie Judin, among others. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Hong Kong’s Sunpride Foundation in Kowloon, and the X Museum in Beijing, China. 

Notes: There is an excellent 2019 interview, entitled “Ghost World”,  between Jessica Ross of Juxtapoz Art & Culture and Kyle Dunn located at: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/kyle-dunn-ghost-world/

The Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program has a personal and well-documented December 2020 Visiting Artist Lecture by Kyle Dunn located on YouTube under the title: “Kyle Dunn: Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series”.

Top Insert Image: Justin J. Wee, “Kyle Dunn, Brooklyn Studio”, 2021, Color Print, Galerie Magazine

Second Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Into the Crevasse”, 2019, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster and Foam Panel, 121.9 x 175.3 x 5.1 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Window”, 2020, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster, and Foam Panel, 162.6 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm, Private Collection

Robert Reed: Film History Series

Amos Carr, “Robert Reed”, circa 1955-1960, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Jan Green

Born at Highland Park, Illinois in October of 1932, Robert Reed was an American film and television actor who is best known for his role as the patriarch in American Broadcast Company’s 1969 sitcom “The Brady Bunch”. A three-time Primetime Emmy nominee for his television work, Reed was also a stage actor who performed in Shakespearean productions.

Robert Reed, birth name John Robert Rietz  Jr, was the only child of Helen Teaverbaugh and John Robert Rietz, a government employee who was stationed throughout the Mid-West. Reed received his elementary education in Des Plaines, Illinois until 1939 at which time the family moved to Navasota, Texas. The family relocated twice more before settling in Muskogee, Oklahoma where Reed’s father worked at a turkey and cattle farm. Reed was a member of the local 4-H agricultural club and exhibited the calves he had raised; however, his primary interests laid in music and theater.

While attending Muskogee’s Central High School, Reed participated in its theater productions; he also worked as a radio announcer at local radio stations for which he wrote and produced dramas. Enrolled in 1950 as a drama student at Northwestern University, Reed appeared as a lead character in eight plays, several of which where under the direction of the university’s celebrated drama coach Alvina Krause. After graduating, he traveled to London where he studied for a term at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Reed returned to the United States and performed in summer stock productions in Pennsylvania and later joined New York City’s off-broadway ensemble “The Shakespeare-wrights” and Chicago’s Studebaker Theater Company. 

In the late 1950’s, Robert Reed moved to Los Angeles to continue his acting career. His first guest-appearance in an 1959 episode of the television family comedy “Father Knows Best” led to guest roles on the sci-fi series “Men into Space” and the western series “Lawman”. Reed’s first credited film role was Johnny Randall in director Ralph Brooke’s 1961 horror thriller “Bloodlust!” for Crown International Pictures. His first starring television role was defense lawyer Kenneth Preston, playing alongside actor E. G. Marshall, in the CBS popular courtroom drama “The Defenders”, a twenty-two time nominee for the Primetime Emmy Awards and winner of two Outstanding Drama Series Awards. 

While filming “The Defenders” in its 1964 third-season, Reed made his Broadway stage debut in the role of Paul Bratter, replacing Robert Redford, in Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park”. In 1968, he performed in the Booth Theater production of playwright Samuel Taylor’s comedy “Avanti!” and appeared in director Robert Wise’s biographical musical “Star!”, which starred Julie Andrews as the British performer Gertrude Lawrence. In the latter part of the 1960s, Reed had guest roles in such series as the sitcom “Family Affair”, the detective shows “Ironside” and “The Mod Squad”, and episodes of the anthology series “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater”. 

Due to his successful performances in “Barefoot in the Park”, Robert Reed was signed in 1968 to both Paramount Pictures and the American Broadcast Company (ABC). Paramount gave him the lead role as the patriarch Mike Brady in series’ creator Sherwood Schwartz’s new sitcom “The Brady Bunch”, a family comedy in which a widowed man with three boys marries a woman with three girls. This five-season series starred Florence Henderson as Carol Brady, the wife, and comedic actress Ann Bradford Davis as the maid Alice Nelson. A favorite series of the 1970s, “The Brady Bunch” went into syndication and spawned several other series, two television reunion films, and two parody films. 

Throughout the production of “The Brady Bunch”, Reed was not excited about the role. He often felt that the show was beneath his level of training as a serious Shakespearean actor. Reed frequently made suggestions in an effort to make the sitcom more realistic; however, most of these were ignored. Occasionally Schwartz, now executive producer, would allow Reed to direct an episode in order to relieve the tension between them. Schwartz eventually decided to replace Reed for the sixth season of the series but the show was canceled before production. Despite his problems with Schwartz, Reed became friends with his co-stars Florence Henderson and Susan Olsen who played Carol Brady’s daughter, Cindy. 

Robert Reed, while filming “The Brady Bunch”, also had a recurring role of Lieutenant Adam Tobias on the Columbia Broadcasting Company’s detective television series “Mannix” which starred Mike Connors. He appeared in three to five shows on each of the eight “Mannix” seasons. Beginning in 1974, Reed made guest star appearances on series and movies produced for television. His 1975 role as doctor Pat Caddison, who eventually disclosed an identity as transgender in a two-part episode of “Medical Center”, earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. Reed also appeared in the 1975 “Secret Night Caller”; the 1976 “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” and “Rich Man, Poor Man”; and the 1977 miniseries “Roots”, among others. 

Reed returned to the character of Mike Brady for several spin-offs and sequels throughout his remaining career. This included the 1976 variety show “The Brady Bunch Hour” which allowed him opportunity to sing and dance; the 1988 television film “A Very Brady Christmas”; the 1989 episode, entitled “A Very Brady Episode”, for the NBC sitcom “Day by Day”; and finally the 1990 short-lived drama series “The Bradys”. Reed’s last onscreen appearance was the April 1992 episode “Ain’t Misbehavin’” for the CBS crime drama “Jake and the Fatman” which starred William Conrad.  

In the last years of his life, Robert Reed taught classes on Shakespeare at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also performed alongside actress Betsy Palmer on the touring stage production of Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr.’s 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist “Love Letters”. Tested positive for HIV, Robert Reed passed away from a rare form of colorectal cancer at the age of fifty-nine in Pasadena, California in May of 1992. He is interred at the Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie, Illinois. 

Notes: Robert Reed was married for five years to fellow Northwestern University student Marilyn Rosenberger. Before the divorce in 1959, they had one child, a daughter Karen Rietz. Reed kept the fact that he was gay a close secret, as public knowledge of his sexual orientation would have damaged his career and caused the demise of “The Brady Bunch” show. Several years after his death, Reed’s “Brady Bunch” co-stars, notably Florence Henderson and Barry Williams who had the role of Greg Brady, confirmed Reed’s sexual orientation and revealed that the entire cast and crew of “The Brady Bunch” had been aware of it at the time of production.

Northwestern University drama coach Alvina Krause was the life-long partner of Bloomsburg State College physical education teacher Lucy McCammon. After her retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1963, Krause gave private instruction for master-drama classes as late as 1977. She moved to Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania in 1971, where she shared a house with McCammon. Beginning in 1978, Krause was the artistic advisor, and later the artistic director, of the Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble founded by her former master-class students. Alvina Krause passed away on the 31st of December in 1981 at the age of eighty-eight; her partner Lucy McCammon passed on the 19th of December in the same year.

A short biography of Robert Reed can be found at the Oklahoma Historical Society site located at: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=RE041

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert Reed in Barefoot in the Park”, Gelatin Silver Print, New York Public Library

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert Reed”, circa 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Jan Green

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert Reed”, Date Unknown, Autographed Studio Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed”, 1961, “The Defenders” Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print, CBS Television

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert Reed”, 1990, CBS Television Promotion Photo, Gelatin Silver Print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Private Collection

Jacques Sultana

The Artwork of Jacques Sultana

Born to a judge and his wife at a Breton village in 1938, Jacques Sultana was a French contemporary, post-war painter, graphic artist and designer who worked during his career in a combination of Art Nouveau and Symbolist styles. He was a prolific painter and produced a large number of photo-realistic canvases throughout his career depicting both clothed and nude male figures.

Expelled from the family home at the age of twenty-two due to his homosexuality, Sultana decided in 1963 to relocate to Paris where he found residence in the 16th arrondissement. During the 1970’s, Sultana created a remarkable series of graphite drawings centering on male nudes and employing surrealist or psychedelic motifs. Of these, his 1975 graphite on paper “L’Oiseau Rare” is considered one the best in the series.

After a period as an art teacher, Jacques Sultana began working in 1978 as a graphic designer and illustrator. He created fashion trade advertisements for several clients, among which was Eminence, a French manufacturer of men’s swimsuits and underwear. Sultana also created illustrations for the distiller Pernod and automobile manufacturer Renault as well as the French Ministry of the Navy for which he illustrated all the service’s military outfits. 

Beginning in 1994 until his death, Sultana devoted himself entirely to painting, most often male nudes in a hyper-realistic and often homoerotic style. He died at the age of seventy-four on the twenty-fourth of July in 2012 at his longtime 16th arrondissement home in Paris. 

A retrospective of Jacques Sultana’s work, entitled “Jacques Sultana, Pentre Hyper-Réaliste”, was held in March to April of 2022 at Paris’s Galerie du Passage in coordination with the publication of an art book of the same name. Sultana’s work can be found in many private collections including the collections of Pierre Passebon and Jean-Paul Gaultier. 

Notes: There is a dearth of biographical information on Jacques Sultana’s life as well as details on his paintings. If anyone has more information, please share it. I am particularly interested in the time he spent in Paris and the titles of his work. 

Top Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “La Pantalon Rouge”, 2001, Oil and Acrylic on Masonite, 63 x 38.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Tendresse”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Marche de Soho”, 1997, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Hevré Guibert: “He Who Wished to be Master of the Truth”

Photographers Unknown, He Who Wished to Be Master of the Truth

He had to finish his books, this book he had written and rewritten, destroyed, renounced, destroyed once more, imagined once more, created once more, shortened and stretched out for ten years, this infinite book, of doubt, rebirth, modest grandiosity. He was inclined to destroy it forever, to offer his enemies their stupid victory, so they could go around clamoring that he was no longer able to write a book, that his mind had been dead for ages, that his silence was just proof of his failure. He burned or destroyed all the drafts, all the evidence of his work, all he left on his table were two manuscripts, side by side, he instructed a friend that this abolition was to continue. He had three abscesses in his brain but he went to the library every day to check his notes.

His death was stolen from he who wished to be master of his own death, and even the truth of his death was stolen from he who wished to be master of the truth. Above all the name of the plague was not to be spoken, it was to be disguised in the death records, false reports were given to the media. Although he wasn’t dead yet, the family he had always been ostracized from took in his body. The doctors spoke abjectly of blood relatives. His friends could no longer see him, unless they broke and entered: he saw a few of them, unrecognizable behind their plastic-bag-covered hair, masked faces, swaddled feet, torsos covered in jackets, gloved hands reeking of alcohol he had been forbidden to drink himself.

All the strongholds had collapsed, except for the one protecting love: it left an unchangeable smile on his lips when exhaustion closed his eyes. If he only kept a single image, it would be the one of their last walk in the Alhambra gardens, or just his face. Love kept on thrusting its tongue in his mouth despite the plague. And as for his death it was he who negotiated with his family: he exchanged his name on the death announcement for being able to choose his death shroud. For his carcass he chose a cloth in which they had made love, which came from his mother’s trousseau. The intertwined initials in the embroidery could bear other messages.

Hevré Guibert, A Man’s Secret, Written in Invisible Ink: Selected Stories, 2020, Translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Semiotexte  Publishing

Born in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. Through his novels and autobiographical studies, he was influential in changing the French public’s attitudes towards the HIV/AIDS crisis. Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. His art and his writings were closely linked to his private life. Those of whom he wrote often became his friends, and his loved ones were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.

Guibert’s writing style was initially inspired by the work of Jean Genet and, later, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, a post-war author who explored obsession and isolation through multiple perspectives. Three of Guibert’s lovers played an important role in his life and work: Thierry Jouno, director for the International Theater for the Deaf whom he met in 1976; philosopher and author Michel Foucault whom he met in 1977; and Vincent Marmousez, a teenager who inspired his 1989 novel “Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”.

Born into the conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and a former teacher, Hervé Guibert moved to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, he entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for the glossy women’s magazine “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel/diary, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”. 

Guibert was hired in 1978 as a photography critic by “Le Monde”, France’s evening newspaper, and successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In the same year, Guibert completed his second book “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”, a collection of stories centered on a singular character, published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris. During the 1980s, Guibert was a reader at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for the Young Blind) in Paris. This experience became the basis for his 1985 “Des Aveugles” which won the Fénéon Prize for that year. 

In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires. For a collaborative work with his theatrical friend, opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau, Guibert shared a 1984 Best Screenplay César Award for the 1983 “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.

In 1987, Guibert was granted a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert was given a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began work on recording what would be the remainder of his life. In June of 1989, he married Christine, the partner of director Thierry Jouno, so his royalty income would pass legally to her and her two children. 

In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. In 1990, Guibert revealed his HIV status in his real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. He described in this work the existential effect the virus had on his life, its impact on a complete generation of people, the deaths of friends and lovers, and how AIDS forever transformed humanity’s relationship with desire and sexuality. 

Following the release of his 1990 novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances. He filmed scenes of his daily life with AIDS between July of 1990 and February of 1991. This film, “La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (Modesty of Shamelessness)”, produced by Pascale Breugnot, was broadcasted posthumously on French television in January of 1992. Guibert published two more additional auto-fictional novels that detailed the progression of his illness: the 1991 “Le Protocole Compassionnel” and the “L’Homme au Chapeau Rouge (The Man in the Red Hat)” which was published posthumously in 1992. 

Hervé Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his hospitalization in the autumn of 1991 and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991. 

A consummate photographer and author, Hevré Guibert had published twenty-five books before his death, five of which were published in the last year of his life. Excellent translations of his work are now readily available through many sites. Several volumes of Guibert’s work can be read online at the Internet Archive

Notes: A selection from Hervé Guibert’s posthumously published “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991”, translated from the French by author Nathanaël, can be found at the Asymptote Journal site: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/nonfiction/herve-guibert-the-mausoleum-of-lovers/

A 2014 review of “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991” can be found at the Lambda Literary Organization site: https://lambdaliterary.org/2014/10/mausoleum-of-lovers-journals-1976-1991-by-herve-guiber/

Dennis Cooper’s blog has an excellent article on Guibert’s 1989 “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” that contains photography by Guibert, a biography, media trailers, book excerpts and a 1993 interview: https://denniscooperblog.com/spotlight-on-herve-guibert-to-the-friend-who-did-not-save-my-life-1989/

There is a noteworthy article by The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas from the print issue of September 21st in 2020 entitled “When a Virus Becomes a Muse”. This review of Hevré Guibert’s life and work can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/when-a-virus-becomes-a-muse

Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno

Top Insert Image: Ulf Andersen, “Hervé Guibert, Paris”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, 40.3 x 39. 2 cm, William Talbott Hillman Foundation

Second Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Sienne, 1979”, Edtition of 25, Gelatin Silver Print on Cartoline, 14.5 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “L’Oisillon, Santa Caterina, Elba”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, 14 x 21.7 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Michel Foucault”, 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, 14.5 x 21.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert” Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, September 2020 Issue of The New Yorker

 

Derek Jarman: Film History Series

Derek Jarman, “Caravaggio”, 1986, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematography Gabriel Beristain, Cinevista (USA)

Born in Northwood, Middlesex in January of 1942, Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English artist, film maker, costume and stage designer, writer and poet, and gay rights activist. His film career began with experimental Super 8mm shorts and developed into such mainstream films as the 1986 historical drama “Caravaggio” and the 1989 “War Requiem”, that featured Laurence Olivier’s last screen performance.

As an author, Jarman published several works: a poetry collection entitled “A Finger in the Fishes Mouth”; two diaries, “Modern Nature” and “Smiling in Slow Motion”; two treatises on his art and films, “Chroma” and “The Last of England (aka Kicking the Pricks)”; and the 1984 “Dancing Ledge”, an autobiography of his life until the age of forty.

The son of Royal Air Force officer Lancelot Elworthy Jarman and Elizabeth Evelyn Puttock, Derek Jarman received his elementary education at the preparatory Walhampton School and Dorset’s Cranford School, a progressive boarding and day institution. Beginning in 1960, he studied Art and English at King’s College, London, which was followed in 1963 by four years of study at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art. In the 1970s, Jarman embraced his homosexuality and became a public figure for the gay rights campaign. 

Jarman’s first venture in film making was a series of experimental shorts filmed with Super 8mm film, a format he used frequently throughout his career. Among these films are the 1984 “Imagining October, an examination of art and politics at the end of the Cold War; 1985 “The Angelic Conversation”, an arthouse drama of homoerotic images combined  with Judi Dench’s readings of Shakespeare sonnets; and 1990 “The Garden”, an arthouse allegory that examined the suffering and ostracism of a gay male couple during the AIDS crisis. “The Garden” was entered in 1991 into the 17th Moscow International Film Festival.

As a stage set and costume designer, Derek Jarman did the design work for the 1968 Sadler’s Wells Opera production of “Don Giovanni” at London’s newly renovated Coliseum in the West End. He was chosen as the production designer for director Ken Russell’s 1971 historical horror-drama “The Devil’s”, a controversial film for which Russell received the Best Foreign Director Award at the 1972 Venice Film Festival. Jarman’s work with this film, as well as his work on Russell’s 1972 “Savage Messiah”, gave him a transition into mainstream narrative filmmaking.

Jarman’s debut film was the 1976 “Sebastiane”, a story spoken in ancient Latin dialogue about the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. This film featured some of the first positive images of gay sexuality in British films. “Sebastiane” was influenced by films from the Italian arthouse oeuvre, particularly the cinematic style of Frederico Fellini. In 1977, Jarman began shooting scenes for the 1978 “Jubilee”, a heavily punk-influenced film that transports Queen Elizabeth I forward in time to an England troubled by the unemployment and rising inflation of the 1970s. Now considered a cult classic, the film was adapted in 2017 as a play for the Manchester Royal Exchange Theater.

After several years of preparation, Derek Jarman directed his next film, the  1979 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. His original adaptation was intended for a stage play; however, he ultimately decided to proceed with a film adaptation. Seeking a balance between the aspects of theater and film, Jarman reworked the text so it would capture the mystery of the original without the theatrics. Inspired by films produced by Hammer Film Productions, Jarman utilized voice-over narration, costumes from muliple eras, sounds of heavy breathing, and blue camera filters to create a film that was well received upon its release.

Jarman learned his HIV-positive diagnosis on the twenty-second of December in 1986. An outspoken advocate of gay rights, he openly spoke publicly about his condition and his struggle with the virus. Despite his illness, Jarman continued making both mainstream films and Super 8mm shorts. In 1987, his arthouse film “The Last of England” was released. This film dealt with the loss of English culture in the 1980s and the formation of the Section 28 Local Government Act that banned any “promotion” or discussion of homosexuality and thus stifled LGBT support groups.

Derek Jarman’s 1989 “War Requiem”, produced by Scottish novelist and director Don Boyd, brought Laurence Olivier out of retirement for his last screen appearance. For its soundtrack, the film used noted composer Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem”, a work he wrote for the consecration of the Coventry Cathedral. Violent war footage and poetry written by war hero Wilfred Owen were overlaid on the score. While filming his 1990 “The Garden”, Jarman became seriously ill but managed to complete the work. This arthouse film was loosely based on Christ’s crucifixion; however, the film’s protagonist is a gay male couple whose idealistic existence is interrupted by arrest, humiliation, torture and death.

Now working in a simpler format due to his failing health, Jarman directed his 1991 “Edward II”, a romantic historical drama based on Christopher Marlowe’s 1594 play of the same name. This was followed by the 1993 experimental comedic-drama “Wittgenstein” based on the life of philosopher and professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose life and career were affected by periods of depression. By 1993, Jarman was dying of AIDS-related complications that had already rendered him partially blind and only able to see in shades of blue. 

Despite his advancing illness, Derek Jarman completed his 1993 “Blue”, a single screenshot of saturated blue color with a background soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner. Over the soundtrack, Jarman and some of his long-time collaborators described Jarman’s life and artistic vision. “Blue” made its debut at the 1993 Venice Biennale and later became part of the collections at the Centre Georges Pompidou, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Collection, and the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis. Jarman’s final film was the 1994 “Glitterbug”, a documentary of his life as seen through home movies, that was posthumously aired on BBC Two’s episodic television show “Arena”.

Jarman died on the nineteenth of February in 1994 at the age of fifty-two at London’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. His body is interned in the graveyard at St. Clement’s Church, Old Romney, Kent. A blue English Heritage plaque honoring Derek Jarman’s  life was placed at the site of his live-in studio at London’s Butler’s Wharf in 2019. 

Notes: After his HIV-positive diagnosis, Jarman made the decision to leave London for a period and bought a small fisherman’s cabin, Prospect Cottage, on the beaches of Dungeness, Kent, with an inheritance received from his father. Using his creative energy, Jarman created a sculpture garden from discarded metal engine parts and local coastal plants. After his death, Prospect Cottage was purchased in 2020 through an Art Fund campaign and is now a public site overseen by the UK charity Creative Folkestone. Jarman’s archives from the cottage were placed on a long-term loan to the Tate Museum Archive. 

An 2023 article by artist and curator Robert Priseman for “ART UK”, entitled “Derek Jarman’s Garden: A Heart of Creativity”, examines Jarman’s life at Prospect Cottage: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/derek-jarmans-garden-a-heart-of-creativity

“FILM London” has a short 2024 article on Jarman’s life and the Jarman Award for emerging artist filmmakers that was instituted in 2008: https://filmlondon.org.uk/flamin/about-derek-jarman

Alastair Curtis wrote an excellent 2023 article for “FRIEZE’ magazine on Derek Jarman’s final film “Blue” and its adaptation into a stage production: https://www.frieze.com/article/derek-jarman-blue-now-2023

Top Insert Image: Trevor Leighton, “Derek Jarman”, 1990, Bromide Fibre Print, 36.7 x 29 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Caravaggio”, 1986, Cinematography Gabriel Beristain, Cinevista (USA), Umbrella Entertainment (Australia)

Third Insert Image: Steve Pyke, “Derek Jarman”, 1983, Bromide Print, 37.6 x 38 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Fourth Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Sebastiane”, 1976, Cinematography Peter Middleton, Cinegate Ltd

Fifth Insert Image: David Thompson, “Derek Jarman”, 1992, Toned Archival Print on Kentmere Paper, 34.5 x 27.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Bottom Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Jubilee”, 1978, Cinematography Peter Middleton, Cinegate Ltd

Trevor Southey

The Art of Trevor Southey

Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Africa in 1940 to parents of colonialist Dutch descent, Trevor Jack Thomas Southey was a celebrated Mormon painter, print maker, sculptor and educator. His heritage can be traced to European colonists who settled in Cape Town, South Africa in the seventeenth-century. Southey’s work celebrated the human form and sought to transform humanity by challenging viewers to rediscover their inner soul.

Trevor Southey’s early interest in art developed during periods of rheumatic fever that often confined him to bed with only pencils, paper, and art books from the school library. His formal art education began with studies at the Brighton College of Art in Sussex, England. A year later, Southey studied at the Natel Technical College in Durban, South Africa where he met and was baptized by Mormon missionaries. In the early 1960s, he served as a Latter Day Saints missionary with the organization’s South Africa Aid program. 

Retaining his African and European origins, Southey emigrated to the United States in 1965 and studied at the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he earned both his Bachelor and Master Degrees. Southey taught art education at the university and became a founding member in 1966 of the highly significant Mormon Art and Belief Movement, an artist organization that was active until 1976. During his teaching career, Southey worked to establish a Mormon art form through his use of Latter Day Saint theology. 

Despite his homosexuality, Trevor Southey married psychotherapist Elaine Fish, the daughter of Jesse Fish and Lucile Cottam, in 1967 after a brief courtship of several months. In an attempt to conform to the teachings of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, the couple settled down in the foothills of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, built a homestead in Alpine  and raised four children. Southey along with artists Neil Hadlock, Dennis Smith and Gary Ernest Smith founded a small artist community in Alpine during the 1970s.

Southey resigned from Brigham Young University’s faculty in 1977 and began to pursue a personal artistic career. Coming to terms with his homosexuality, Southey divorced Elaine Fish in 1982 after fifteen years of marriage and found himself excommunicated on the outskirts of Mormon society. Thirty years later, Southey’s reputation as an artist prompted an invitation to once again join the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

As a figurative Realist, Trevor Southey used the depiction of the physical body to portray the soul, a method employed frequently by painters and sculptors of the Renaissance period. He expressed human spirituality through commonplace figures of an ethereal nature in scenes that combined realism and personally related allegories. Southey’s work, focused on the Rocky Mountain area, examined environmental issues that effected the land particularly those concerns that dealt with urban planning. In 1985, he relocated his Salt Lake City studio to San Francisco where Southey’s artwork achieved both critical and popular success. His four children from his annulled marriage later joined him in San Francisco. 

During the 1990s, Southey became an accomplished stained glass designer, sculptor and print maker. His many intaglio etchings exhibited the same elegance and delicate draftsmanship of his paintings. Southey’s “Full Bloom” intaglio series began as a pencil drawing of a woman he knew from church. In its final form, this successful series of etchings became a universal symbol of resurrection and the cycle of life. Fully established now as an artist of note, Southey received commissions for both paintings and sculptures throughout the United States and the United Kingdom . 

Trevor Southey did a series of illustrations for several books of poetry by writer, playwright and lecturer Carol Lynn Pearson. These include the 1976 “The Growing Season” and the 1987 “A Widening View”, both published by Bookcraft in Salt Lake City, as well as the 1967 “Beginnings” published by Trilogy Arts in Provo, Utah. Southey, along with Brigham Young University Professors Clyde W. Robinson and Donald R. Marshall, participated in a 1979 panel discussion with authors Diane Leigh and Brett Parkinson on the nature of art in the Church of the Latter Day Saints. This dialogue was later published in the Fall 1979 edition of “Century II”, the Brigham Young University journal for its College of Humanities.

In 2013, after a decade-long battle with prostate cancer and a recent diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, Southey returned to Salt Lake City, Utah to be cared for by friends and relatives. His four children also relocated to be by his side. Trevor Southey died, at the age of seventy-five after a year at the Salt Lake City hospice, on the twentieth of October in 2015. His funeral service was held at the Dumke Auditorium of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Southey’s work can be found in many private collections and both public and corporate institutions.

“ It made itself most known in my work. Even that work long preserved within the seeming sanctity of a subject like the traditional family would reflect that shunned part of my being. Works done innocently, once they were complete still held the whole truth within them. Perhaps no painting revealed that more clearly than Prodigal. Often while I refused to acknowledge this, others could read it quite clearly. Prodigal was conceived from Jesus’ parable of reconciliation and familial love. I feared the sensuality of this work, and indeed, it was gently declined by the clients. At its conception and execution, that sensuality was naive and even innocent, as was the deeper implications of content. Other works follow as a celebration of this new personal “home,’ this integration, the comfort of finally being one within oneself and one within a new society. Some of these images are almost embarrassingly overt, though that was by no means my intention.”

Trevor Southey, Gay, Excerpt from Warnock Fine Arts: Trevor Southey

Notes: Trevor Southey attracted controversy in 1981 with his “Flight Aspiration”, a painting of a flying nude man and woman that was part of a mural commissioned for the Salt Lake City International Airport. The mural was removed after protests by the American Family Association, a national anti-pornography group led locally by Romola Joy Beech, a well known Latter Day Saints conservative activist. After five years in storage at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, “Flight Aspiration” was placed into the museum’s permanent collection in 1986.

Duane Jennings, a long-time friend of Southey and author of the two-volume series “Stumbling Blocks and Stepping-Stones”, wrote a short article on the artist’s life for the online site “Affirmation: LBGTQ Mormons Families and Friends”: https://affirmation.org/trevor-southey-1940-2015/

The Affirmation site also has an article by Seba Martinez that discusses Southey’s personal experience in marriage, excommunication from the Church of the Latter Day Saints, and break-up of family bonds due to a loved one being homosexual: https://affirmation.org/pbs-documentary-mormons/

Selected for the LDS Film Festival, Nathan Florence’s 2022 film, “Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey”, is a narrative documentary on Southey’s life and work. This film contains film clips of Southey with his work. “Bright Spark” can be found in its entirety on the PBS/MPT site: https://www.pbs.org/video/bright-spark-the-reconciliation-of-trevor-southey-ld2x8l/

The Trevor Southey website is located at: http://www.trevorsouthey.com

The Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art site has a presentation of Trevor Southey’s large-scale painting series “Warriors” for viewing and purchase: http://www.trevorsouthey.com/warriors/index.html

Second Insert Image; Trevor Southey, “Yuri”, 2000, “Warrior” Series, Oil on Canvas, 213.4 x 152.4 cm, Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art

Third Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Transition”, 1980, Edition of 77, Etching, 20.3 x 15.2 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Russ”, 1990, Prismacolor Pencil Drawing on Silkscreen, 76.2 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

 

Carl Van Vechten

The Photography of Carl Van Vechten

Born at Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June of 1880, Carl Van Vechten was an American accomplished photographer, author, critic, and ardent supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. He was the youngest child of prominent banker Charles Duane Van Vechten and Ada Amanda Fitch, a talented musician who founded the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A passionate follower of music and theater from an early age, Van Vechten left Cedar Rapids after graduating high school to pursue his interests and advance his education in Chicago.

Van Vechten entered the University of Chicago in 1899 where he studied a variety of topics including music, art and opera. Developing an interest in writing, he contributed work to the “University of Chicago Weekly”. After graduating from the university in 1903, Van Vechten accepted the position of columnist for the “Chicago American”, a growing afternoon edition newspaper. During this period, he began his experiments in photography, a passion for which he later gained widespread recognition.

After moving to New York City in 1906, Carl Van Vechten was hired by “The New York Times” as an assistant to its music critic. This position allowed him to continue his interest in opera through travels to Europe. In 1908, Van Vechten became the newspaper’s Paris correspondent and, upon his return to the United States in 1909, became the first American critic of modern dance. He later became the drama critic for the “New York Times” during 1913 and 1914. During a 1913 musical premiere in Paris, Van Vechten met and became a life-long friend and champion of American author and poet Gertrude Stein. Upon her death in 1946, he became her literary executor and assisted in the printing of her unpublished writings.

Having finished with writing both fiction and critical, Van Vechten at the age of fifty began photographing his large circle of friends with a 35 mm Leica camera, given to him by the Mexican painter, ethnologist and art historian Miguel Covarrubias. Van Vechten’s earlier career as a New York Times writer and his theater connections through his actress wife, Fania Marinoff, provided him access to new and established artists as well as cultural figures of the time. Van Vechten’s photographic portfolio became a collection of America’s cultural icons of the early to middle 1900s.

Carl Van Vechten’s portraits were usually busts or half-length poses in front of backdrops. Although he employed an assistant for lighting setups, Van Vechten was skilled in the techniques of photographic development. The subjects of his portraits included such notables as playwright Eugene O”Neill, novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, actress Anna May Wong, social activist Langston Hughes, actress and singer Pearl Bailey, and many others. Van Vechten’s photographs were exhibited at New York City’s luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1933, the Museum of the City of New York in 1942, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1951, and at annual Leica Exhibitions between 1934 and 1936.  

Van Vechten strongly felt that his documentary photographic work of the mid-1900s should be available for scholarly research. During his lifetime, he donated his collection of manuscripts, letters, clippings and photographs to several university libraries. The Museum of the City of New York houses an extensive collection of over two-thousand images. In 1966, the United States Library of Congress acquired a collection of fourteen-hundred photographs that had been the property of Saul Mauriber. Originally a busboy at the Stage Door Canteen during World War II, Mauriber was Van Vechten’s photographic assistant for twenty years; he organized the collection and later became the photographic executor for Van Vechten’s estate.

As an author, Carl Van Vechten published several volumes of essays on a variety of subjects between 1915 and 1920, during which time he acted as an informal literary scout for the newly formed publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher printed seven novels by Van Vechten between 1922 and 1930, including the 1922 “Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works”, a fictionalized autobiographical work built around the Harlem Renaissance, and the 1930 “Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life”, a satirical portrait of upper-bohemian New Yorkers and Harlem jazz clubs.

Active in both writing and photography in his latter years, Carl Van Vechten died in December of 1964 at the age of eighty-four in New York City. His ashes were scattered over the Shakespeare Garden in the city’s Central Park. Van Vechten’s personal papers, a collection of nineteen-hundred Kodachrome slides, and his series “Living Portraits: Color Photographs of African Americans from 1939 to 1964” are housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His work is also housed in Tennessee’s Fisk University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, among others.

Notes: While in Europe in 1907, Carl Van Vechten married Anna Snyder, his long time friend from Cedar Rapids. Their marriage lasted for five years; the divorce was finalized in 1912. Two years later, he married American-Russian actress and dancer Fania Marinoff. This marriage lasted for fifty years during which the couple played a prominent role in the Harlem Renaissance. After a successful fifty year career, Marinoff died from pneumonia at the age of eighty-one in November of 1971.

From the beginning of their relationship, Fania Marinoff was aware of Van Vechten’s romantic and sexual relationships with men. Most notable of these was his relationship with Richmond journalist Mark Lutz, who was introduced to Van Vechten at a 1931 party hosted by Hunter Stagg, editor of “The Reviewer” literary magazine. Lutz became a model for Van Vechten’s early photographic work and would maintain a close relationship until Van Vechten’s death. Upon Mark Lutz’s death in 1968, all his correspondence with Van Vechten, some ten-thousand letters, were destroyed as per his wishes. His collection of photographs by Van Vechten were donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A November 2023 article by Anne McCrery for the Library of Virginia’s “The Uncommon Wealth”, entitled “Authors of All Four Sexes” examines Hunter Stagg, his friendship with Van Vechten and Lutz, and the literary renaissance of Richmond, Virginia: https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2023/11/22/hunter-stagg/

The Elisa Rolle/ Queerplaces website has a biographical article on Carl Van Vechten that includes a collection of his portrait photographs gathered by Tony Scupham-Bilton: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Carl%20Van%20Vechten.html

Top Insert Image: Mark Lutz, “Carl Van Vechten, Villa Curonia, Florence, Italy”, 1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Vincent Price”, 1939, Bromide Print, Marquette University, Wisconsin, 

Third Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Mark Lutz, Rhinebeck, New York”, July 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.3 x 27.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fourth Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “James Earl Jones”, May 1961, Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 34.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “John Gielgud”, 1936, Vintage Print, 25.3 x 18 cm, Estate of Carl Van Vechten, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Stéphane Bouquet: “Because the Rain is Stopping”

Photographers Unknown, Because the Rain is Stopping

from The Next Loves: I

His look and it took maybe 3
hellos / seconds
only       his head underneath the blue hoodie
he takes off
because the rain is stopping       look here’s
the planner’s confirmation and
someone’s holding an imaginary map of the conversation we’ll say
that and that
the streets will be all orderly
if I stay close inside
the zones he surveys
but it isn’t easy
imagining that the table and the lamp and the evening
sound like his breathlessness when he uncovers me and cleans

from The Next Loves: V

Red t-shirt and husky voice
we do yoga together       much less strong
than I am but so much more beautiful
at the end in savasana when we’re supposed to become
one of those vibrations in the air and the ritual bell
sets us
almost behind absence I can only
think like an animal to live oh oh
oh that long slime desire
stretched out 2 meters away if I
rolled over on him really would that from now on be the only
hope of slowing
because of the sweetness in your bones
the quickness of death against which I recite a rose
       is a rose is a rose is a rose

Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves, 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Born at Paris in October of 1968, Stéphane Bouquet is a French author and translator, film critic and screenwriter, poet, actor and choreographer. The son of a French nurse and an American military man, his work covers a wide range of genres, disciplines and literary traditions. 

Stéphane Bouquet earned his Master of Arts in the field of Economics at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. He is an established translator of poets from the New York School, a group of experimental painters and associated poets who lived and worked in the downtown area of Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949, painter Robert Motherwell had coined the name “New York School” for this group. Members included, among others, painters Larry Rivers, Hedda Sterne, and Alfred L. Copley as well as poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. 

Bouquet’s work, both literary and formally innovative, covers a wide range of formats from intricate sonnets and lengthly sequential poems to prose reflections and dramatic compositions that explore personal relationships and contemporary urban life. Influenced by American poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, Bouquet incorporates the spoken language of daily life and gay sexuality into his poems. He takes the energy from the poetry of the New York School and blends it with older forms of poetic attitudes from France and Europe to form a personalized approach to life’s details, accidents, and desires.

Stéphane Bouquet is the author of eight collections of poetry as well as a book of essays on poems, the 2018 “La Cité de Paroles (The City of Words)”.  Two of these collections have been translated into English by poet Lindsay Turner: the 2019 “The Next Loves”, a collection of frank, sometimes rueful, love poems that trace the intimacy in contemporary gay life: and the 2023 “Common Life”, three poems, a play and three short stories of everyday queer life, politics, and social gatherings. Bouquet has also published three books on film history: the 2008 “Sergei Eisenstein”, Soviet pioneer in the theory and practice of film montage; the history of American filmmaker “Gus van Sant” in 2009, and the 2012 “Clint Fucking Eastwood”, an analysis of the popularity of Eastwood’s films in France . 

As a screenwriter, Bouquet wrote twenty screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films and short films. Of these, he is best known for the 1998 comedy “1999” which he co-wrote with actor and comedian Franck Amiack; the 2000 comedy “Hors Jeu (Out of the Game)” directed by Bouquet and co-written with Amiack; the 2009 comedy short “Nuts” written and directed by Bouquet; and the 2024 television film “The First Eternal” written by Bouquet and now in pre-production. Bouquet also directed Palanquée Films’s 2013 “Douce Nuit (Silent Night)” and UniFrance’s 2009 “Gauche Droite (Left Right)” and 2013 “Maman est Là (Mom is Here)”.

Having a long-standing interest in performance arts, Stéphane Bouquet has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris and, for stage directors and actors, classes at Switzerland’s La Manufacture in Lausanna. He is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, a literary award promoted by the Institut François d’Italie and the French Embassy in Italy to reward the best translators of contemporary French literature to Italian. 

Bouquet’s literary work has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors.

Notes: A 2024 research article by poet and translator Lindsay Turner, entitled “Translating Utopia: Stéphane Bouquet’s Queer Futurities” can be found at Duke University Press’s Romantic Review website: https://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-abstract/115/1/134/387783/Translating-UtopiaStephane-Bouquet-s-Queer?redirectedFrom=fulltext

For the Poetry Society of America, Lindsay Turner wrote a short article, entitled “Visiting Poet: Lindsay Turner on Stéphane Bouquet”, that discussed Bouquet’s 2019 “The Next Loves” poetic collection which she had translated into English: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/visiting-poet/bouquet

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s “Full Stop” literary review has an article by writer John Steen on Stéphane Bouquet’s “The Next Loves” at: https://www.full-stop.net/2019/10/16/reviews/john-steen/the-next-loves-stephane-bouquet/

An English translation by Lindsay Turner of Stéphane Bouquet’s poem “As an Excuse” can be found at Louisiana State University’s online literary and arts journal “NDR” produced by graduate students in its MFA Program of Creative Writing: http://ndrmag.org/translations/2020/05/as-an-excuse/

Second Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “Common Life”, February 2023, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “The Next Loves”, September 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Peter Glenville: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville”, Date Unknown, Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Born Peter Patrick Brabazon Browne at Hampstead, London in October of 1913, Peter Glenville was a British actor and distinguished director of both theater and film. He was born into the Irish-Catholic theatrical family of Shaun Glenville (née John Brown), one of the prominent comedic pantomime performers of British music halls, and Dorothy Ward, an English pantomime actress of a successful fifty-two year career. 

While his parents’ act toured England’s theaters, Peter Glenville attended some of the country’s preeminent boarding schools, including the Jesuit-operated Stonyhurst College, a structured institution that encouraged both excellence and devotion in its students. Excelling in music, religious doctrine and his academic studies, Glenville played on the college’s rugby team, sang in the choir, and was president of its debating society. Drawn to the theater from an early age, he performed his first theatrical role in the school’s 1923 production of “The Last Practice”.

In 1932, Glenville entered Christ Church College, Oxford, as a law student; however, he spent most of his time in its theater department. Glenville became a member of the Oxford Union, the university’s debating society, and the youngest president to have served on the prestigious Oxford University Dramatic Society, the OUDS. After his time at Oxford, Glenville relocated to London where he began his acting career. He joined the leading Shakespearean company and performed at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and London’s Old Vic, the Royal Victoria Hall.

During the years of World War II, Peter Glenville remained in London during the Blitz bombings to perform at West End theaters opposite such stars as Vivien Leigh. He appeared in various leading roles in such productions as Edgar Wallace’s Chicago-gangland play “On the Spot” in London’s West End, and Mary Hayley Bell’s horror thriller “Duet for Two Hands” at London’s Lyric Theatre. Glenville, in addition to his acting, started overseeing performances and was eventually appointed Director of the Royal Victoria Hall.

Established as a prominent West End director by the mid-1940s, Glenville worked with such notable writers as Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Graham Greene, and Terence Rattigan. In 1945, he met theatrical producer Hardy William “Bill” Smith who became both his professional and intimate life partner. In 1949, Glenville and Smith relocated from London to New York City where they continued their work in theater; Smith would produce his partner’s plays in both London and New York. Glenville made his New York directorial debut in October of 1949 with Terence Rattigan’s “The Browning Version” at the Coronet Theatre. In London and Manchester, he later directed Rattigan’s 1954 two one-act plays, collectively entitled “Separate Tables”, that starred Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman.

Peter Glenville followed his debut with several notable productions on Broadway and in Europe. From 1949 to 1973, he directed twenty-one Broadway productions. Among these are playwright William Archibald’s 1950 “The Innocents” based on “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James; Broadhurst Theatre’s 1951 production of “Romeo and Juliet” that featured Olivia de Havilland’s Broadway debut; Bridget Boland’s 1954 “The Prisoner” with Alec Guinness, staged at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theater and London’s Globe Theater; and Michael and Fay Kanin’s 1959  “Rashomon”. Performed at New York’s Music Box Theatre, “Rashomon” received three Tony Award nominations, one of which was Best Direction for Glenville. 

In 1959, Grenville’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” was presented as a musical entitled “Take Me Along”. For his performance as Sid Davis, Jackie Gleason received the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. Glenville directed the first production in English of Jean Anouilh’s 1959 “Becket or the Honour of God” in 1960. Starring Lawrence Olivier and Anthony Quinn, this play was nominated for five Tony Awards and won four, including Best Play and Best Actor for Anthony Quinn. Glenville continued his Broadway success with other award-winning musicals, comedies and serious dramas.

In the prime of his career, Peter Glenville began to work in the Hollywood film industry with many of the studios’ major stars. His first film with Columbia Pictures and BD Film Corporation was the 1955 psychological thriller “The Prisoner” with Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins. Glenville stayed with Columbia Pictures for his second film, the the 1958 “Me and the Colonel”, a Golden Globe winning comedy with Danny Kaye. In addition to his directorial work, Glenville had an uncredited acting role in this production. His 1961 drama “Summer and Smoke” for Paramount Pictures received five nominations for the Academy Awards; Glenville was also nominated for a Directors Guild of America Award and the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion.

Glenville directed four more films for various studios, among which were the 1966 British comedy “Hotel Paradiso” for Metro Goldwyn Mayer that starred Alec Guinness and Gina Lollabrigida, and the 1967 American political drama “The Comedians”, an all-star production, although poorly received, that featured Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Lillian Gish, Peter Ustinov and upcoming actors Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones. Most notable of Glenville’s films was the 1964 British historical drama “Becket”, an adaptation of Anouilh’s 1959 play that starred Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. Released by Paramount Pictures, the film was well received at the box office and earned multiple Academy Award nominations, winning the Best Screenplay. This film also won awards from the British Film Academy and British Society of Cinematographers, among others.

Following a Broadway production of Tennessee William’s “Out Cry” in 1973, Peter Glenville retired from active theatrical and film work due to the change in cinema towards violence and method acting. He and “Bill” Smith eventually moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where they developed a notable estate. They spent their final years entertaining their longtime friends and major political figures including heads of State and former Presidents. Peter Glenville died on the third of June in 1996 in New York City from a heart attack at the age of eighty-two.

Notes:  Hardy William Smith was born in England on the first of December in 1916 and served in the United States Navy during World War II. After his discharge from service, he remained in England and began a career in the London theater. In 1945, Smith met Peter Grenville and began their long relationship. According to records, Smith resided in New York City and later at White Plains, New York, most probably after Glenville’s death in 1999. Hardy William Smith passed away on the third of October in 2001 at the age of eighty-four. His body is  interred at the Gates of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

Smith was Grenville’s directorial assistant on his 1951 Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Broadhurst Theatre. He also produced three other Broadway shows for Grenville: playwright Ugo Betti’s 1955 drama “Island of Goats” at the Fulton Theatre; Feydeau and Desvallierès’s 1957 comedy “Hotel Paradiso” at the Henry Miller’s Theatre; and Michael and Fay Kanin’s 1959 crime drama “Rashomon” at the Music Box Theatre. 

The Peter Glenville Foundation’s online site is located at: https://peterglenville.org

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is the repository of Peter Glenville’s correspondence, business records, clippings, appointment books and personal records that span the years from 1914 to 2001. A complete  inventory of his papers can be found at: https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00395

Second Insert Photo: Photographer Unknown, “Richard Burton, Peter Glenville, Elizabeth Taylor”, 1967, Film Set of “The Comedians”, Cinematography Henri Decaē, Metro Goldwyn Mayer

Third Insert Image: Peter Glenville, “Becket”, 1964, Film Poster, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures 

Fourth Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville and Peter O’Toole”, 1963-64, “Becket” Film Set, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures 

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville”, 1963-64, “Becket” Film Set, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures 

 

Howard Roffman

The Photography of Howard Roffman

Born in Philadelphia in April of 1953, Howard Roffman is an American lawyer, marketing director, author and photographer. He is best known for his work on the Star Wars franchise as Lucasfilm’s head of Licensing and for his series of photographic art books of gay-positive images published in Berlin by Bruno Gmünder. 

The son of a Jewish family in a white middle-class section of Philadelphia, Howard Roffman’s interest in photography and awareness of his gay identity began early in his life. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and, later, the University of Florida College of Law where he received his Doctor of Law degree in 1977. Roffman served as a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and later at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a law firm in Washington DC.

As an author, Roffman spent years of research for his first nonfiction book, the 1976 “Presumed Guilty: Lee Harvey Oswald in the Assassination of President Kennedy”, a volume published by A.S. Barnes that examined the Warren Commission Report. His second nonfiction work, “Understanding the Cold War: A Study of the Cold War in the Interwar Period”, was published by the Associated University Press in 1977.  

Howard Roffman joined Lucasfilm in 1980 initially as legal counsel but was eventually promoted to general counsel. In 1986, he became the company’s Vice-President of Licensing, a position that included overseeing daily operations, identification of licensing partners, and the execution of agreements. Roffman was instrumental in the 1991 launch of the Star Wars novel franchise. Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire”, the first of this novel series, was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nineteen weeks. 

In 1999, Roffman was appointed President of Lucas Licensing, a subsidiary of Lucasfilm that owns the licensing rights to the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” film series. In this position, he acted as Executive Producer for the highly successful “Star Wars: In Concert” tour, a series of concerts featuring a choir and symphony orchestra synced with footage from the Star War saga films displayed on a three-story LED screen. 

In early 2012, Howard Roffman became a Senior Advisor at Lucasfilm; however in the latter part of the year, he returned to full-time management of the Star Wars franchise. Roffman’s leadership with Star Wars licensing has been credited for redefining the licensed merchandise business. His work became the template used by many major media companies, including Disney which acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Chosen by Brandweek magazine as the 1997 Entertainment Marketer of the Year, Roffman was inducted into the Licensing Hall of Fame in 2012. 

In 1991, Roffman began a career in photography through his meeting a young gay San Francisco couple who were seeking a photographer. By introducing his work to people on the street as well as at fairs and malls, he developed his skills and gradually built an impressive body of work. Over the last three decades, Roffman has published twenty-three volumes of portraiture photography and numerous magazine articles and calendars. After many years of shooting black and white film, he presented his first collection of digital color images in January of 2009, “Private Images, Bel Ami”, published through Bruno Gmünder.

Howard Roffman serves as the Executive Vice President of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Film Society. He has aided in the financing of several acclaimed documentary film projects. Among these were directors David Weissman and Bill Weber’s 2011 “We Were Here”, which illuminated the personal and community issues raised by the AIDS epidemic, and directors Jeff Orlowski, Jerry Aronson and Paula DuPré Pesmen’s 2012 “Chasing Ice”, a multi-year chronicle of the earth’s melting glaciers. 

Howard Roffman’s photographic work is represented by Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, a gallery that specializes in vintage and contemporary photography: https://wesseloconnor.com

Notes: The September 2019 issue of the online Metrosource magazine has an article on Howard Roffman’s photographic career at: https://metrosource.com/howard-roffman-gay-nude-photographer-star-wars/

Medium: Human Stories & Ideas has a short article on Howard Roffman and a link to a 2017 video interview entitled “Messing with a Classic” in which he discusses Lucasfilm and his work with “Star Wars” saga: https://medium.com/@wayofthewarriorx/howard-roffman-tv-interview-guy-who-was-in-charge-of-the-eu-l-l-ca33735117d2

Second Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Pictures of Fred”, 2000, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany

Third Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “John, Gary and Kris by the Stoop”, 1995, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, 36 x 36 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Three”, January 1997, Second Edition, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany

Charles Henri Ford: “Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone”

Photographers Unknown, Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone

And you may not have hair as curly as the alphabet
but if your googoo eyes were a bundle of germs
there’d be an epidemic
With your greenhorn complexion
and your grasswidow ways
you’d make a butcher kill a granite cow
and weigh the gravel out for hamburger.
I mean you’d start the eskimos stripteasing,
give dummies the shakes,
get  flyingcircuses  to  crawl  on  their  hands  and  knees.
No I wouldn’t put it past you.
Just let somebody set you on the fence,
by  gosh  foulballs  would  be  annulled
and home-runs the rule.
The weather forcast that overlooked you, baby,
sure better watch out for the next cyclone,
seeing how my uptown’s flattened,
and  my  downtown  a-waving  in  the  wind.

Charles Henri Ford, I Wouldn’t Put It Past You, The Breathless Rock, Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems, 1972, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles

Born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi in February of 1908, Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, and artist whose career spanned and influenced twentieth-century’s modernist era. In his lifetime, he exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United States, published over a dozen collections of poetry, directed experimental films, and edited the American literary and surrealist art magazine “View”.

Charles Henri Ford was the first of two children born into the southern Baptist family of Charles and Gertrude Cato Ford. He acquired his formal education at Catholic boarding schools in the American South and had one of his first poems published by The New Yorker magazine in 1927. Ford became part of the modernist literary movement with the publishing of his monthly “Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms” in 1929 and 1930. The magazine introduced new talents such as authors James Farrell and Paul Bowles as well as published submissions by such writers as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams.

Through “Blues” magazine, Ford communicated with the young novelist Parker Tyler who introduced him to both the poetry and men in the Village areas of Manhattan. Together they collaborated on a novel, “The Young and the Evil”, a fragmented account of bohemian gay life, drag balls and cruising. After his magazine ceased publication, Ford traveled to France and became a member of Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris. Through Stein, he became acquainted with members of the American expatriate community which included such artists and writers as Natalie Clifford Barney, Kay Boyle, Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes.

Ford had a brief affair with Barnes and traveled with her to Tangiers, Morocco where, while waiting for the publication of “The Young and the Evil”, he typed Barnes’s completed novel “Nightwood” for its publication. Ford returned in 1934 to Paris where he met Russian-born surrealist painter and designer Pavel Tchelitchew, a former Stein protégé whose work was gaining recognition. This creative and loving relationship developed into a strong, though occasionally tempestuous, bond that lasted for twenty-three years. In late 1934, Ford and Tchelitchew left Europe and returned to New York City where they settled into an East Side penthouse.

In 1938, Charles Henri Ford published his first full-length book of poems “The Garden of Disorder” which contained an introduction written by author William Carlos Williams. Influenced by the poetic works of Jean Cocteau, Ford felt that poetry had a relationship with all forms of art, be it a novel, essay or theatrical production. His poetry is easily noticed for its surrealistic format of short spurts of words; however, he also adapted his style to political poetry such as the work he published in the American Marxist magazine “New Masses” , at that time a politically oriented journal which covered anti-lynching and equal rights for women.

In 1940, Ford and Parker Tyler collaborated on the avant-garde and surrealist art magazine “View”, a quarterly publication that established New York as a center of surrealism. The magazine interviewed local artists as well as the many European surrealists who had fled the war in Europe. Contributions to the magazine came from many prominent artists including Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marc Chagall and René Magritte, among others. A publishing imprint of “View” magazine, View Editions, was established to publish monographs and volumes of poetry, two of which were André Breton’s 1946 “Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares” and Ford’s 1959 “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”.

Charles Henri Ford and Tchelitchew moved in 1952 to Europe where they continued their artistic careers. Ford had a 1955 photography exhibition “Thirty Images from Italy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, followed by a 1956 solo exhibition of drawings and paintings in Paris. In July of 1957, Pavel Tchelitchew, now a United States citizen, died at the age of fifty-eight in Grottaferrata, Italy, with Ford by his bedside. His body was taken to Paris and interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Ford returned to New York City in 1962 and began to associate with the underground filmmakers and artists involved in the Pop movement. He began to experiment in collage images and created a series of lithographs with spliced-typefaces, acid colors, and pop culture images. A visual form of concrete poetry, these “Poem Posters” were exhibited in 1965 at New York’s prominent Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery on Madison Avenue. In the latter part of the 1960s, Ford focused on directing his own films, the first of which was the 1967 “Poem Posters”, a documentary of his recent exhibition, later entered into the Fourth International Avant-Garde Festival in Belgium. Ford’s second film, the 1971 “Johnny Minotaur”, was a surrealistic film-within-a-film that combined Greek mythology of Theseus and the Minotaur with erotic imagery of male anatomy and sexuality. Only one surviving print of the film is known.

Charles Henri Ford relocated in the early 1970s to Nepal where he purchased a house in Katmandu. In 1973, he hired local teenager Indra Tamang to cook and be his photography assistant. Tamang became basically Ford’s surrogate son, caretaker, and artistic collaborator for the rest of Ford’s life. They toured India and the Mid-East, resided for a period in Paris and Crete, and finally relocated to New York City. Ford purchased an apartment for himself and Tamang in The Dakota, a building that faced Central Park and was well known for its artistic tenants among whom was the actress Ruth Ford, Charles’s sister. Settled in the city, Ford created a series of art projects incorporating his collage materials and Tamang’s photography.

In the 1990s, Ford edited an anthology of articles previously published over the seven-year history of “View” magazine. Published as “View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 1940-1947”, the 1992 volume’s introduction was written by Ford’s longtime friend, author and composer Paul Bowles. In 2001, Ford published selections from his diaries in a volume entitled “Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957” that covered the period from his father’s death to the death of Tchelitchew. In the same year, he participated in a two-hour documentary on his life, entitled “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”, directed by James Dowell and John Kolomvakis for Symbiosis Films 2000.

On the twenty-seventh of September in 2002, Charles Henri Ford died in New York City at the age of ninety-four. In his will and testament, Ford left some paintings and the rights to his co-authored novel “The Young and Evil” to Indra Tamang. Ruth Ford died in August of 2009 at the age of ninety-eight; she bequeathed her and her brother’s apartments to Tamang who had been both companion and caretaker. In 2011, Tamang carried Ruth and Charles Ford’s ashes to Mississippi where they were buried in Brookhaven’s Rose Hill Cemetery.

Notes: Charles Henri Ford’s 1991 “Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems” is available in its entirety on the Document.Pub site: https://dokumen.pub/out-of-the-labyrinth-selected-poems-0872862518-9780872862517.html

An exhibition review entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Love and Jump Back” by Demetra Nikolakakis for “Musée: Vanguard of Photography Culture” magazine can be found at: https://museemagazine.com/culture/2021/2/25/exhibition-review-charles-henri-ford-love-and-jump-back

The Artforum magazine has an informative 2003 article, written by Michael Duncan, on Charles Henri Ford and his association with novelist Parker Tyler and artist Pavel Tchelitchew: https://www.artforum.com/columns/charles-henri-ford-165330/

The Film-Makers’ Cooperative site has short articles with stills on Charles Henri Ford’s two experimental films “Poem Posters” and “Johnny Minotaur”: https://film-makerscoop.com/filmmakers/charles-henri-ford

Matthew D. Kulisch, one of three curators for the Backwords Blog, wrote an article for the site entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Association and America’s First (Queer) Surrealist Artist” : https://www.backwordsblog.com/single-post/2016/10/12/charles-henri-ford-association-and-americas-first-queer-surrealist-artist

The September 2024 issue of Noah Becker’s “White Hot Magazine” has an article entitled “Love and Jump Back: Photography by Charles Henri Ford at Mitchell Algus”, written by Mark Bloch: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/henri-ford-at-mitchell-algus/4984

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Charles Henri Ford”, 1930-1940, Gelatin Silver Print, 26.4 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Gerald Malanga as Orpheus)”, circa 1965, Photolithograph, Image 98.4 x 68.1 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Third Insert Image: Robert Geisel, “Charles Henri Ford, The Dakota, NYC”, 1989, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Soul Map / Jayne Mansfield), circa 1965, Photolithograph, 99.1 x 69.2 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Charles Henri Ford (and Indra Tamang), The Dakota, NYC”, 1997, Gelatin Silver Print, 27.9 x 35.6 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Tony Azito: Film History

Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito”, 1978, Publicity Photo Card, The AIDS Memorial, New York City

Born Antonio Zito in New York City on the eighteenth of July in 1948, Tony Azito was an American dancer and actor in both film and theater. After attending an audition in 1968 with friends at the Juilliard School, New York City’s performing arts conservatory, he was granted a full scholarship and became one of the first acting students to study under its director John Houseman. Influenced by the work of dancer and choreographer Anna Sokolow, Azito began to study modern dance, an unusual art form for a person of his height- six feet, three inches (190 cm).

Azito left the Juilliard School without finishing his degree, partly as a result of an argument with director Houseman, and performed with Anna Sokolow’s Theatre/Dance Ensemble for two years under the name Antonio Azito. He returned to drama in the 1970s and worked in off-Broadway productions, including several at the East Village’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club headed by director Wilford Leach. In 1971, Azito performed in John Dillon and Eric Bentley’s “The Red, White and Black”, a collaborative effort between La MaMa and the Columbia University School of the Arts. 

In 1973, Tony Azito appeared in two productions, one of which was Wilford Leach and John Braswell’s production of the 1872 Gothic vampire novella “Camilla”. After appearing in the 1974 production of Nancy Fales’s “Ark”, he performed with the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company in Leach’s 1974 “C.O.R.F.A. X. (Don’t Ask)” that toured Europe throughout remainder of the year. Azito’s debut on Broadway was as Samuel, a dancing role created especially for him, in avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman’s revival of “The Threepenny Opera” for the 1976 New York Shakespeare Festival. Azito continued his theater work with a role in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1977 three-act musical “Happy End” at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre and Chelsea Theatre Center.

Azito’s next and best known role was the Sergeant of Police in theatrical producer Joseph Papp’s 1981-1982 modernized version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” staged at New York City’s Uris and Minskoff Theatres. Azito’s performance earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical and a Drama Desk Award in the same category. This Broadway version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s play ran for seven hundred and eighty-seven performances and won both a Tony Award for Best Revival and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical. 

Tony Azito appeared once more with the New York Shakespeare festival, this time as Feste, the fool in the house of Countess Olivia, in William Leach’s 1986 production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”. He continued working in theater with performances at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum at the city’s Music Center, and with the American National Theater Company at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center. Azito’s final Broadway role was Mr. Nick Cricker in William Leach’s 1988 musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”.

Walking back from a theater performance of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”, Azito was struck by a New York City taxi that left the scene. Both his legs were badly broken and it took several years until he could walk again. Azito’ss return to the stage was in the 1990 summer stock revival of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s musical “She Loves Me” in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He later appeared in Edgar Gorey’s two-act revue “Amphigorey: A Musicale” staged in Boston as well as several productions of playwright Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties”.

For his first film role, Tony Azito was given the lead in Howard Goldberg’s 1975 gangster fantasy “Apple Pie”, now considered a musical cult classic. In 1980, he appeared in Mark Reichert’s neo-noir crime mystery “Union City”. Azito’s most memorable film role was a recreation of his Broadway role in Wilford Leach’s 1983 comedic film version of “The Pirates of Penzance”. He appeared in several more films including George Bowers’s 1985 comedy “Private Resort”, Norman Jewison’s 1987 romantic comedy “Moonstruck” and Howard Brookner’s 1989 “Bloodhounds of Broadway”. After a cameo as party dancer Digit Addams in the 1991 “The Addams Family”, Azito’s final film appearance was as the Librarian in the 1993 H.P. Lovecraft horror anthology “’Necronomicon: Book of the Dead”. 

During his stay in the hospital after the hit and run taxi accident, Azito was diagnosed with cancer and had tested positive for HIV. He made the decision to fight the cancer with chemotherapy; however, it weakened his immune system to such an extent that his HIV infection became full-blown AIDS. Azito continued his performances in regional theater and appeared in several films before his retirement in 1994. Tony Azito died at the age of forty-six from AIDS on the twenty-sixth of May in 1995 at Manhattan’s Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center. He was survived by his partner Frederick Bertolt Fritz Richter. 

Notes:  John Towsen’s “All Fall Down: The Craft & Art of Physical Comedy” has a short posting on Tony Azito that contains film clips from a live stage performance at New York’s Delacorte Theater as well as a scene from the 1984 ”Chattanooga Choo-Choo” : http://physicalcomedy.blogspot.com/2011/07/happy-birthday-tony-azito.html

A trailer for the 1975 cult class “Apple Pie” which showcases Tony Azito’s unique dancing style can be seen at the IMDB site: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1287302169/?ref_=tt_vi_i_1

A musical number with Tony Azito from Wilford Leach’s 1983 film version of “The Pirates of Penzance” can be found at the Free Social Encyclopedia for the World: https://alchetron.com/Tony-Azito

There is a memorial Facebook page for Tony Azito that contains many images, anecdotes, film trailers and Azito’s 1972 “Sing Jumbalaya Sing” song published through Epic Records: https://www.facebook.com/p/Tony-Azito-100063528963851/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito, New York City”, The AIDS Memorial, NYC

Second Insert Image: Al Hirschfeld, “Tony Azito (Study for The Pirates of Penzance)”, Ink on Paper, 27.9 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito as Sergeant of Police”, Joseph Papp’s “The Pirates of Penzance”, 1981-1982, Gelatin Silver Print 

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito”, Date Unknown, Color Print

Richard Stabbert

The Artwork of Richard Stabbert

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1959, Richard Stabbert is an American painter, author and researcher. A self-taught artist, he creates small intimate paintings inspired by the memories of people, both past and present, who made an impression on his life. Depicting the casual and positive experiences in life, Stabbert’s sentimental and often whimsical work presents an idyllic retreat from the speed and commotion of the industrial world. 

Born to German immigrant parents, Stabbert spent time in his early years on the beaches of the New Jersey shoreline, a period in his life that provides both inspiration and reference for his work. Stabbert’s later summer experiences in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as the time he spent in Paris also serve as influences in his work. His paintings are known for their simple details, bold color composition and equally strong foregrounds and backgrounds, similar characteristics to those works in  the Naïve genre.

Richard Stabbert’s acrylic and chalk paintings, almost gestural in execution, evoke a casual spontaneity and relaxed sensuality. He creates his work through a limited color palette that is dominated by pink and blue tones. Central to the compositions are Stabbert’s male figures constructed simply with broad, almost impasto, brushwork heightened by strokes of deep black and shaded areas of lighter grays. The background vistas in his work have a flat rendering style composed of simplified details and expanses of tonal primary colors. 

Stabbert’s paintings have been included in the 2011 edition of “100 Artists of the Male Figure: A Contemporary Anthology of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture”; the 2011 “The Art of Man: Volumes 1-6”, a special anthology edition that includes artist interviews and work from six quarterly journals of “The Art of Man”; and Firehouse Publishing’s 2014 “Vitruvian Lens – Edition 5: Fine Art Male Photography”.

One of Richard Stabbert’s first solo exhibitions was “Été”at the Les Mots à la Bouche, an established bookshop and gallery in Paris. He also presented his work in the 2011 “Memories of Moments” held at New York City’s BrianRiley1ProjectSpace, a Broadway creative hub that provides a platform for artistic visions. Other gallery exhibitions include those at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in Brooklyn, New York; Asbury Park’s APEX Gallery in New Jersey; Provincetown’s Ray Wiggs Gallery in Massachusetts; the Sidetracks Art Gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania; and Red Bank’s Susan Berke Fine Arts in New Jersey.

Stabbert is the author of the 2013 “Provincetown Memories: Paintings and Words” published in two editions through North Carolina’s Firehouse Publications. This work presents Stabbert’s simple sensual paintings alongside a personal journal of self-discovery, love, and intimate memories of both the beauty and freedom experienced during Provincetown summers.   

In addition to many private collections, Richard Stabbert’s paintings are housed in the permanent collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. His work is now available through Provincetown’s Art Love Gallery located at: https://www.artlovegallery.com  as well as Galerie MooiMan in Gronigen, Netherlands: https://www.mooi-man.nl

Richard Stabbert’s website, which includes new works and gallery contacts, is located at: http://rstabbert.com

Second Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Carry”, 2021, Acrylic and Chalk Paint on Canvas, 22.8 x 30.5 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Craig”, 2018, Acrylic on Canvas, 20,3 x 30.5 cm

Arthur Tress

The Photography of Arthur Tress

Born in Brooklyn, New York in November of 1940, Arthur Tress is an American photographer with an anthropological background who is known for his figurative work and staged psychological images . His career has encompassed a vast range of work from ethnographical and environmental documentation to modernist and magical-realistic images.

The youngest of four children born to European-Jewish parents, Arthur Tress became interested in photography early in his life. In his early teen-years, he photographed the buildings and abandoned amusement parks in the Brighton Beach and Coney Island neighborhoods. Tress studied painting at Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, New York where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1962.

After graduating, Tress moved to Paris, France, and briefly attended film school. He traveled extensively for four years around the world, particularly in Asia and Africa, where he developed an interest in the cultural and tribal beliefs of those he observed. Tress began to work in the field of ethnographical photography, which led to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachian communities. Tress’s images from this period formed his 1960s series “Appalachia: The Disturbed Land”. 

Arthur Tress was influenced by the photographers of The American Social Landscape, who in the tradition of straight, documentary photography focused on the aspects of the everyday environment, that is society’s practices, systems, and relationships as well as the boundaries between them. Members of this group included photographer Robert Frank known for his 1958 collection “The Americans”, Bruce Davidson known for his photographic study of East Harlem life, and Danny Lyons known for his documentary work on the civil rights movement. Tress was also impressed by such black and white cinematographers as Edward Tisse (1927 Battleship Potemkin), Gregg Toland (1941 Citizen Kane), and Boris Kaufman (1953 On the Waterfront). 

Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the human and economical costs of pollution. He documented the neglected areas of New York City’s urban waterfronts as well as the economic problems of New York’s inner city and their effects on its residents. From this body of work, two volumes of “Open Space in the Inner City” were published; the 1971 Volume One, an architectural drawing series of  potential recreational areas in the city, and the 2010 Volume Two,  a documentary series of inner city residents with a focus on urban teenagers.  

In the summer of 1964, Arthur Tress stayed in San Francisco and photographed the city during a historic culture clash. San Francisco was the site of the launch of the Beatles’ first North American tour as well as the contentious 28th Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace that nominated Barry Goldwater of Arizona for President. During his time in the city, Tress became one of the photographers to shoot some of the first images of public LBGTQ life. After developing his negatives in a communal darkroom in the Castro District, he mounted two small exhibitions in North Bay galleries that summer. From this body of work, seventy images were later published as the 2012 “Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964”. 

Tress’s “Dream Collector” series began with a visit to a workshop designed to allow children the opportunity to make paintings and poetry from remembered dreams. He followed this visit with research on the nature of dreams, attendance at dream therapy sessions, and interviews with adults on their remembered dreams. Combining his interest in derelict urban spaces with ethnographical photography, Tress created a series of staged black and white photographic work with psychological undertones. One example of this series is the 1970 “Flood Dream”, an image of a child looking out a hole in a roof set against the background of a gray deserted beach.

An exhibition entitled “Arthur Tress, San Francisco 1964” was presented at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in 2012 accompanied by a monograph published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Other monographs that examine Tress’s work include “Arthur Tress: The Dream Collector”, “Shadow: A Novel in Photographs”, and “Theatre of the Mind, Reeves and Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage: Photographs 1956-2000”.

In 2013, an exhibition of Tress’s work from “San Francisco 1964”, “Dream Collector” and “Theater of the Mind” was held at the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts. A retrospective of Arthur Tress’s earlier works, entitled “Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows” was held from October 2023 to February 2024 at the John Paul Getty Center in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

Arthur Tress’s work is contained in many private collections and numerous museums and institutions including Stanford University, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2021, an anonymous donor gave the University of Pennsylvania an outstanding collection of Arthur Tress photography. Penn Libraries now houses the largest collection, two thousand-five hundred photographic prints, of Tress’s work in the United States. 

Notes: Arthur Tress, interested in Asian culture since his early travels, gathered together over the years a large personal collection of thirteen-hundred Japanese illustrated books. After a 2018 visit to Penn Libraries’ conservation department, he donated his entire Japanese collection to the university’s library.

Arthur Tress’s website, which contains photographic series from 1963 to 2015, can be located at:  https://arthurtress.com

An interview between author Robert Hirsch and Arthur Tress for the January/February 2013 issue of LightResearch magazine can be located at:  https://lightresearch.net/interviews/ArthurTress.html

On September 14, 2024, California’s Cambria Center for the Arts Film Festival will be showing the documentary “Arthur Tress: Waters Edge”. A special exhibition of his work will be shown at the center’s Studio Gallery from September 1st to the 14th. Tickets are available at: https://www.my805tix.com/e/tress-1

For those interested, limited edition photographs occasionally are available through established auction sites. The J. Paul Getty Museum’s shop has a limited edition of signed posters for Arthur Tress’s 2023-2024 exhibition “Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows”: https://shop.getty.edu

Top Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Self Portrait”, 2018, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Young Man & Statue of Adonis, Key West, Florida”, 1980, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Boy on Bike Crossing Williamsburg Bridge, New York”, 1969, Open Space in the Inner City Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 8, Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Fourth Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Two Men, Two Rooms, New York”, 1977, Edition of 50, Gelatin Silver Print, 25 x 25 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, Title Unknown, (Flies), 1984, Spray Paint Series, Gelatin Silver Print