Jules Aarons

The Photography of Jules Aarons

Born in the New York City borough of The Bronx in October of 1921, Jules Aarons was an American space physicist and photographer. He is recognized for his scientific studies of radio-wave propagation as well as his documentary photography of Boston’s mid-twentieth century ethnic neighborhoods.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Jules Aarons was raised in a working-class environment during the economic challenges of the interwar period, which included the Great Depression era that affected many families in the manufacturing trades. He studied at City College of New York and graduated in May of 1942 with a Bachelor Degree in Education. After serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, Aarons studied physics at Boston University, where he earned his Master of Science in Physics in 1949.

As a Fulbright scholar, Aarons completed his Doctorate in Science at the University of Paris in 1954. He specialized in the study of ionospheric scintillations, the rapid fluctuations in radio wave amplitude and phase caused by irregularities in the ionosphere’s electron density, and their effects on communication and navigational systems. From 1948 to 1981, Arrons worked as senior scientist at the Air Force Geophysics Research Laboratory at Hanscom Field in Massachusetts; his research led to improvements in satellite and global positioning technology.

In 1957, Jules Aarons formed the Joint Satellite Studies Group, an international collective that studied atmospheric effects on satellite signals. This group expanded to become the Beacon Satellite Studies; its ionospheric monitoring stations proved useful in designs for the Air Force’s space-based communication and navigation systems. In 1981, Aarons became a research professor in Boston University’s astronomy department and helped establish the university’s Center fo Space Physics in 1987. Throughout his decades-long research, he published over one hundred scientific papers and authored three books on such topics as radio astronomy, magnetic storm phases and ionospheric scintillations.

Aarons’s interest in photography began in his youth and continued through his college classes and later scientific work. His many travels around the world for seminars and studies offered opportunities for his photography. Interested in a social documentary approach to photography, Aarons was influenced by the work of Sid Grossman, a co-founder of New York’s Photo League; Austrian-born humanist photographer Lisette Model; French humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: and the Hungarian-French photographer and filmmaker Brassaï who captured the essence of Paris in his work.

Jules Aarons is known primarily for his late 1940s and early 1950s street-photography of Boston’s ethnically diverse West End and its predominantly Italian North End neighborhoods. During the process of developing his own unique style, he initially began taking photographs of the West End in 1947 to document Boston’s streets and people. Using a double-lens Rolleiflex, Aarons tried to capture the West End’s social environment without being intrusive. To avoid any formal posing, he shot informal photos of ordinary people in public settings, mostly without their knowledge.

After retiring from Massachusetts’s Hanscom Field Laboratory in 1981, Aarons became a professor at Boston University where he led projects on space physics. It was at this time that he ceased his photography, not for lack of time, but due the fact that his eyes had grown too irritated by darkroom chemicals. A research professor emeritus of astronomy and space physics as well as an acclaimed photographer, Jules Aarons died at the age of eighty-two in Boston on the twenty-first of November in 2008.

Jules Aarons’s work is in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale and Bibliotheque Historique in Paris, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, among others. In addition to his scientific works, he published six volumes of photographs and essays, the most recent being the 2006 “Public Spaces/Public Moments: The Photographs of Jules Aarons” published through Boston’s Kayafas Gallery.

Notes: All images, unless noted, are from the Jules Aarons Estate/ Kayafas Gallery, Boston

The Jules Aarons website is located at: https://www.julesaarons.com

The Red River Paper Blog has a 2020 article by Arthur H. Bleich entitled “Jules Aarons: Mind of a Scientist, Eye of an Artist” on its site: https://www.redrivercatalog.com/blog/jules-aarons-mind-of-a-scientist-eye-of-an-artist.html?srsltid=AfmBOorECX90BByO-Zo1RQ895pqACtLGBdKeknSDhM6yu9isuMmSzD9K

Award-winning author William Landay has a 2010 article on Jules Aarons entitled “The Street Photography of Jules Aarons” on his website: https://www.williamlanday.com/2010/02/02/the-street-photography-of-jules-aarons/

Top Insert Image: Kalman Zabarsky, “Jules Aarons”, circa 2001, Gelatin Silver Print, Brown University Bridge, Vol 5 No. 10, October 2001

Second Insert Image: Jules Aarons, “Self Portrait”, “West End, Boston” Series. Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate/Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Third Insert Image: Jules Aarons, Untitled (Group Photo of Nine Boys), “West End, Boston” Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate, Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Bottom Insert Image: Jules Aarons, Untitled (Lounging). 1947-1953, “North End, Boston” Series, . Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate/Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Danny Fitzgerald: Les Demi Dieux

The Photography of Danny Fitzgerald: Les Demi Dieux

Born in the Brooklyn, New York area of Carroll Gardens in 1921, Danny Fitzgerald was an American photographer who produced male nude physique photography between 1958 and 1968. The photographs were produced and marketed by Fitzgerald and his partner, Richard Bennett, under the name “Les Demi Dieux (The Demigods)”.

Born to first-generation Italian-Irish parents, Fitzgerald developed a love for art and film at a very young age. Although he would later travel throughout the world with his camera and his partner, Fitzgerald always considered the working-class Italian-American neighborhood of Carroll Gardens as home and the wellspring for many of his photographs.

Danny Fitzgerald did not seriously considered photography as a possible profession until he was in his thirties. His first series of photographs were of the young bodybuilders at the Abe Goldberg Empire Health and Studio, a second-floor loft gymnasium in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where top bodybuilders of the period would train. Both a physically small and deeply private person, Fitzgerald gained the confidence of these men through asking for assistance with his own workout and sparring as their training partner.

Fitzgerald’s early images were standard compositions with models presented in bikini trunks or posing straps. These photographs, processed by Fitzgerald in his own studio, were initially sold to private collectors. Later marketed under the pseudonym “Les Demi Dieux”, these posed male images were regularly published on the covers and pages of magazines printed by Canadian bodybuilder and entrepreneur Josef Weider. Fitzgerald’s male photos appeared in such popular publications as “Demi Gods”, “The Young Physique”, “Muscles a Go-Go”, and the publisher’s compilation volume “Era” that recognized the best photographers of the 1960s.

Now in his forties during the 1960s, Danny Fitzgerald met bodybuilder Richard Bennett who would become his partner, primary model and collaborator in the photographic process. With Bennett at his side, he returned to Carroll Gardens and began photographing the Italian-American gangs, known as “The South Brooklyn Boys”, as they gathered on the streets. It was at this time that Fitzgerald’s work shifted from standard ‘beefcake photography’ to grittier, realistic documentation of the Brooklyn youth culture.

Influenced by twentieth-century art and film, Fitzgerald began to produce images that were free of the contrivance and overworked poses of standard physique photography. His nudes, presented as portraits set in landscapes or cityscapes, were given a larger context that invited aesthetic discussion. Inspired by the modern artists around him, Fitzgerald employed cinematographic techniques in his images, often placing compositions off-center and dramatizing his subject with the light and shadow contrast technique of chiaroscuro. His disciplined approach towards precise focus, clarity and vivid tonal range displayed Fitzgerald’s meticulous attention to the lighting, lenses, and camera settings.

Danny Fitzgerald’s work was little seen during his lifetime after he broke from the clichés of the beefcake genre. He died in 2000 at the age of seventy-nine without having exhibited his work in a gallery setting. In October of 2013, Berlin’s Bruno Gmünder Verlag published “Brooklynn Boys: Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux”, a collection of the documentary work he had shot in Carroll Gardens. On the twelfth of December in 2013, a posthumous public exhibition of Fitzgerald’s images was held at the Steven Kasher Gallery on New York City’s Second Avenue. The opening and book signing was attended by Fitzgerald’s longtime partner Richard Bennett.

Notes: Abraham Goldberg was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in November of 1924. After his service in the army during World War Two, Goldberg opened his second-floor Manhattan gymnasium, Empire Health and Studio, at 80 Clinton Street in 1950. A fitness trainer and bodybuilder, he appeared on the covers of such magazines as “Your Physique” and “Santé et Force”. Abe Goldberg died in December of 2002 at the age of seventy-eight.

Born in Montreal in November of 1919, Josef (Joe) Weider was a Canadian bodybuilder and co-founder of the International Federation of BodyBuilders (IFBB). He published the first issue of “Your Physique” magazine in 1940 and designed numerous training courses beginning in the 1950s. Weider was the creator of such contests as Mr. Olympia, Ms. Olympia and the Masters Olympia. He founded several major American fitness magazines in the 1980s including “Men’s Fitness”. Josef Weider died in March of 2013 at the age of ninety-three, He was inducted into the International Sports Hall of Fame in 2014.

The Steven Kasher Gallery is located at 166 Second Avenue, 3A, New York, New York. (Appointments only). The gallery can be reached through 9179226861 or steve@stevenkasher.com

Top Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, Untitled (Demi-Dieux Model), 1960, Gelatin Silver Print on Double Weight Paper 12, 12.5 x 10 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, “Johnny, New York”, 1963, Gelatin Silver Print, Printed 2013 Steven Kasher Gallery, Edition of 10, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, “Richard Bennett”, circa 1960s, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, “Swim Hole, New York”, 1964, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

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

Voula Papaïoannou

The Photography of Voula Papaïoannou

Born at the historic city of Lamia in 1898, Voula Papaïoannou was a Greek photographer known for her documentation of the landscape and inhabitants of Greece. Her oeuvre is part of the School of Humanist Photography that emerged in the middle of the twentieth-century after the two World Wars. Instead of momentous events, humanist photography focused on everyday human experience, its nature, mannerisms and customs.

Voula Papaïoannou studied at the Polytechnic University of Athens where she developed an interest in photography. She began her career in the 1930s with several exhibitions of refined, nostalgic images of Greece’s landscape, its architectural monuments, and ancient works of art. However, Papaïoannou’s relationship with the photographic medium shifted drastically at the onset of the Second World War. Deeply affected by the suffering endured by the civilian population of Athens, she began to use her camera to arouse the conscience of the people.

Papaïoannou began to document the conflict’s background, her nation’s preparation for the war effort, and the departure of Greek soldiers to the front lines. She continued her work by documenting the period of German and Italian occupation and the ensuing economic blockade. Papaïoannou also created an emotional photographic series that revealed the emaciated children who were suffering from the great famine of 1941 to 1942.

Greece suffered comparatively much more than most Western European countries during the Second World War due to a number of factors. Heavy resistance led to immense German reprisals against civilians. Greece was also dependent on food imports; the British naval blockade coupled with transfers of agricultural produce to Germany led to a great famine. It is estimated that the Greek population declined by seven per cent during the Second World War. The country’s population also was affected by the rising hyperinflation, the fifth worst in economic history.

After the liberation of Greece, Voula Papaïoannou became a member of the photographic unit under the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation, a body dedicated to assist and repatriate refugees. She toured the Greek countryside documenting the hardships of its rural population devastated by the 1944-1949 Civil War. The most well-known of all Papaïoannou’s work are her photographs which showed families and particularly children living under inhumane conditions. These photographs did not dwell on the sufferings of its subjects but rather told individual stories that focused on their dignity.

Papaïoannou’s work throughout the 1950s expressed Greece’s prevailing optimism, despite its two decades of suffering and thousand of deaths, in both the restoration of its traditional values and the future of mankind. Her photographs of the historic Greek landscape, shot during this period, were barren and drenched in light. Papaïoannou’s images of the Greek inhabitants, however, still showed a proud and independent people despite their poverty.

In addition to work published in the press, two collections of Voula Papaïoannou’s photographs were produced by the Swiss publishing house Guilde du Livre: the 1953 “La Grèce: à Ciel Ouvert (Greece: Open Skies)” and “Iles Grecques (Greek Islands)” in 1956. Her work was later published in the posthumous collection “Images of Despair and Hope: Greece 1940-1960” as a complimentary volume to the 1995 Athens retrospective presented by gallery owners Mouseio Benake and Renes Xippas.

Voula Papaïoannou passed away in Athens, Greece in 1990 at the age of ninety-two. Her photographs are in both private and public collections, including the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture in Athens. Since her death, Papaïoannou’s work continues to be presented in many solo and group exhibitions including one at Barcelona’s cntemporary art and learning center, La Virreina Image Center.

The Benaki Museum of Greek Culture’s website is located at: https://www.benaki.org/index.php?lang=en

Note: All images of Voula Papaïoannou’s work in this article are from the collection of the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture unless otherwise noted.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Voula Papaïoannou”, Date Unknown, Benaki Museum of Greek Culture, Athens, Greece

Second Insert Image: Voula Papaïoannou, “View of Lycabettus from the Acropolis, Athens”, circa 1950, Gelatin Silver Print, 43 x 41.9 cm, Benaki Museum, Athens Greece

Third Insert Image: Voula Papaïoannou, “Women Transporting Mud for Road Construction, Sellades, Arta Prefecture”, 1946, Gelatin Silver Print, 43 x 34 cm, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece

Bottom Insert Image: Voula Papaïoannou, “Mykonos”, circa 1959, Gelatin Silver Print, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece