Tag: new york city

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 

Mel Bochner

The Artwork of Mel Bochner

Born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1940, Mel Bochner is one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. He is a member of that generation of artists who were seeking to break free from Abstract Expressionism and traditional composition. A scholar as well as an artist, Bochner’s influential critical and theoretical essays have always been a central component of his work.

Bochner pioneered the use of language into the visual arts; language progressed from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Over his career, he has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and language- the way we construct and understand them as well as the way their relationship to each other increases our awareness of the world to which we belong.

Born to a sign-painter father in an Orthodox Jewish home, Mel Bochner graduated in 1962 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Fine Arts. He studied philosophy briefly at Chicago’s Northwestern University before making the decision to relocate in 1964 to New York City where he began work as a guard in Manhattan’s Jewish Museum. Encouraged by art critic Dore Ashton, Bochner applied for and was granted a teaching position in art history at the city’s School of Visual Arts.

Bochner’s first exhibition, the 1966 “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily To Be Viewed As Art” held at the School of Visual Arts, is now regarded as a seminal show in the Conceptual Art movement. Not having the necessary funds to frame all his original drawings, Bochner xeroxed copies of his friends’ works and inserted them in four black binders individually placed on four white pedestals. A later conceptual work, the 1998 “Event Horizon”, involved multiple pre-stretched canvases of various sizes, each marked with a horizontal line and the measurement of its length in inches. These canvases were arranged with the lines at the same height along the wall. Seen together, the canveses’ lines formed a horizon of a determined length.

In the 1960s, Bochner was one of the first artists to incorporate the physical gallery space into his art. Some of his works were actually drawn or painted on the gallery’s walls. His 1970 “Language is Not Transparent” presented the white-chalked sentence written on a dripping black square painted directly on the gallery wall. Bochner’s 1969-1970 installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, entitled “Theory of Painting”, involved newspapers, spray-painted with multi-sized blue rectangular shapes, spread on the floor of the enclosed exhibition space.

Along with artists Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth both of whom integrated language into art, Bochner was an early proponent of photo-documentary art which included images of temporary works and performance art. Among his many photographic creations is the important 1966 “36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams”, an arranged collection of forty-eight 29 x 29 cm gelatin silver prints. Resistant to showing all the forty-eight mounted photographs and pen-and-ink drawings in their physical form, Bochner photographed each mounted piece and displayed the complete work as an assemblage of two-dimensional photographs, in essence a microcosm of the exhibition.

In the early 1970s, Mel Bochner began producing series of prints at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press. An avid print maker, Bochner has continuously explored new ways to experiment with traditional and non-traditional printmaking techniques. In 2022 for his latest edition of his iconic text “Howl”, he printed the piece with glitter and iridescent ink in a combination of shimmery copper, iridescent purple and glimmering black. As the viewer moves around the work, the purple shifts in tone depending on the viewer’s vantage point.

Bochner’s work covers a wide range of mediums including colorful paintings and prints containing words, cast pigmented works made from handmade paper, works on shaped canvases, and evocative installations. Among these many forms are the 1978 “Planar Arc”, three irregular shaped paper panels of different colors that are decorated with pastel marks; the 1999 “If the Color Changes (#?)”, a language piece written in gray-lettered German overlaid with scattered multi-colored alphabet letters; and the 1988 “Fourth Quartet”, four rectangular sheets of paper framed together in a pattern on which scattered geometric cubes were drawn in aquatint.

In 2007, Mel Bochner’s work was the subject of two major exhibitions in the United States: a focused retrospective of his language-based works at the Art Institute of Chicago; and a forty-year retrospective of Bochner’s drawings, that culminated a two-year museum tour, at the San Diego Museum of Art in California. Bochner’s works are contained in collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Mel Bochner’s website, which includes exhibitions, artist texts, public projects and recent works, can be located at: http://www.melbochner.net

Notes: The online Artforum magazine has an article written by Princeton University Professor Carol Armstrong entitled “Mel Bochner: Photographs 1966-1969” that reviews Bochner’s work in connection with the 2002 Carnegie Museum show of the same name: https://www.artforum.com/events/mel-bochner-photographs-1966-1969-178514/

David Lasry’s Two Palms Gallery in New York represents the work of Mel Bochner. Its website has a comprehensive section that contains his works, exhibitions, and articles published by major art periodicals: https://www.twopalms.us/artists/mel-bochner#tab:slideshow

The Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco also represents the work of Mel Bochner. A collection of his work is available for viewing at: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/mel-bochner

The online ArtDependence Magazine has an interview with Mel Bochner entitled “The Art of Ideas” located at: https://artdependence.com/articles/the-art-of-ideas-an-interview-with-mel-bochner/

Second Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Repetition- Portrait of Robert Smithson”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 80 x 66 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Portrait of Dan Flavin”, 1968, Ink on Graph Paper, Sheet 11.4 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Wrap- Portrait of Eva Hesse”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 64.8 cm Diameter, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Thank You”, 2015, Four Color Direct Gravure Etching, Edition of 20, 55.9 x 45.7 cm, Private Collection

Allen Barnett: “Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches”

Photographers Unknown, Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches

      Horst was also the one in the article with AIDS. Every day at 4 A.M., he woke to blend a mixture of orange juice and AL721—a lecithin-based drug developed in Israel from egg yokes and used for AIDS treatment- because it has to be taken when there is no fat in the stomach. For a while, he would muffle the blender in a blanket but stopped, figuring that if he woke us, we would just go back to sleep. He laughed doubtfully when I told him that the blender had been invented by a man named Fred who had died recently. It was also the way he laughed when Perry phoned to say their cat died.
      Stark asked Noah, “Don’t you think you were a little hard on Perry?”
      Noah said, “The next thing you know, he’ll be getting an agent.”
      I said, “We’re all doing what we can, Noah. There’s even a role for personalities like his.”
      He would look at none of us, however, so we let it go. We spoke of Noah among ourselves as not having sufficiently mourned Miguel, as if grief were a process of public concern or social responsibility, as if loss was something one just did, like jury duty, or going to high school. His late friend had been a leader at the beginning of the epidemic; he devised a training program for volunteers who would work with the dying; he devised systems to help others intervene for the sick in times of bureaucratic crisis. He was the first to recognize that AIDS would be a problem in prisons. A liberal priest in one of the city’s prisons once asked him, “Do you believer your sexuality is genetic or environmentally determined?”. Miguel said, “I think of it as a calling, Father.” Dead, however, Miguel could not lead; dead men don’t leave footsteps in which to follow. Noah floundered.
      And we all made excuses for Noah’s sarcasm and inappropriate humor. He once said to someone who had put on forty pounds after starting AZT, “If you get any heavier, I won’t be your pallbearer.” He had known scores of others who had died before and after Miguel, helped arrange their funerals and wakes. But each death was beginning to brick him into a silo of grief, like the stones in the walls of old churches that mark the dead within.

Allen Barnett, The Times as It Knows Us, Excerpt, The Body and Its Dangers, 1990, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born in May of 1955 at Joliet, Illinois, Allen Barnett was an American short story writer, activist and educator. He initially studied theater at Chicago’s Loyola University and later relocated to New York City to further his studies and acquire work as an actor. Barnett studied at Manhattan’s The New School and at Columbia University where he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1981. 

In the late 1980s, Barnett worked for American music industry executive Herbert Breslin, who was influential in the early careers of many in the music field, most notably Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo. In 1986, Barnett published his first short story “Succor” in “Christopher Street”, an American gay-oriented magazine founded in New York City by publishers Charles Ortieb and Michael Denneny. 

Learning of the published story, Herbert Breslin forwarded Allen Barnett’s short stories to St. Martin’s Press, a major Manhattan publisher with six imprints, that was founded by England’s Macmillan Publishers. Through St. Martin’s Press, Barnett’s short story “Philostorgy, Now Obscure” was published in “The New Yorker” magazine, a serious publisher of essays, fiction and journalism. 

Barnett lived in New York City at a time when AIDS was building into an epidemic force. It became a vicious disease that was occurring within an environment of medical ignorance as well as indifference on the part of both the political and media establishments. Barnett was one of the earliest volunteers for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a task he continued year after year. He was also a co-founder in 1985 of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) that sought to end homophobic reporting by media organizations. Through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Barnett was an AIDS educator for New York’s 23rd Street YMCA.

Allen Barnett only published one volume of short stories in his lifetime, “The Body and Its Dangers”, published in January of 1990 by St. Martin’s Press. This book is widely regarded as one of the most significant depictions of gay life at the height of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, Barnett’s collection was an nominee for the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award and the winner of the  Ferro-Grumley Award for the year’s best LBGTQ fiction. It also won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in the same year. 

Barnett died in New York City from AIDS-related causes at the age of thirty-six on the fourteenth of August in 1991. A memorial service was held in mid-September at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Notes: One of Allen Barnett’s most notable short stories is “The Times as It Knows Us”. Contained within his 1990 “The Body and Its Dangers”, the story follows its protagonist, Clark, who struggles through life after the recent death of his lover. The full story is available for reading at Harvard’s Resources for Loss located at: https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/resources-for-loss/the-times-as-it-knows-us-by-allen-barnett-contributed-by-colton-carter

Editor Tom Cardamone’s 2010 “The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered” contains twenty-eight essays including one by Christopher Bram that examines Allen Barnett’s life and work. Although there appears to be no recent reprints, used copies are available through various venues; it is also available on Kindle.

Peter Hujar

The Photography of Peter Hujar

Born in Trenton, New Jersey in October of 1934, Peter Hujar was an American photographer known for his black and white portraits. Only marginally known during his lifetime, he has since been recognized as one of the major American photographers in the late twentieth-century. 

Peter Hujar never met his father, who abandoned his mother Rose Murphy during her pregnancy. He was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents in the rural landscape of Ewing Township. Hujar remained with his grandparents until his grandmother’s death in 1946. After which, Hujar lived with his mother and her second husband in New York City; however, the household situation was difficult. He left the home in 1950 at the age of sixteen to live independently. 

In 1953, Hujar entered Manhattan’s School of Industrial Design, later named the High School of Art and Design, where he expressed an interest in photography. Encouraged by his teacher, poet Daisy Aldan, Hujar became a photographic apprentice at a commercial studio where he mastered the technical processes of photography. Four years later, his photographic work had reached museum quality. In 1958, Hujar was able to accompany realist painter and watercolorist Joseph Raffael on study trip to Italy. 

Having been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, Peter Hujar returned to Italy in 1963, this time with painter and sculptor Paul Thek, to study and photograph the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily. These images would later be featured in Hujar’s 1975 “Portraits in Life and Death” published with a written introduction by writer and critic Susan Sontag. Upon his return to New York City in 1964, Hujar became the chief assistant to commercial photographer Harold Krieger, widely known for his innovative advertising work and celebrity portraits. 

In the mid-1960s, Hujar met Andy Warhol and posed for four of Warhol’s short, silent black and white film portraits, the “Screen Shots” series. Four hundred and seventy-two of these three-minute films depicting New York’s cultural figures are known to have survived. In 1967, Hujar was selected as one of the photographers in a master class led by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. The quality of Hujar’s classwork led to assignments from Harper’s Bazaar and other publications; through this class, he met photographers Diane Arbus and Alexey Brodovitch. 

In 1967, Peter Hujar made the decision, at great financial sacrifice, to leave the commercial world and pursue his own photography that would reflect his true personal identity. Hujar and his lover at that time, political activist Jim Fouratt, witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York’s West Village. An influential artist and activist of the gay liberation movement, Hujar, although not actively involved with the Gay Liberation Front, shot the group photo that was used on many of its posters. In 1973, he settled into a loft above the East Village’s Eden Theater on Second Avenue where he resided for the rest of his life. 

Throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Hujar traveled in the art world of lower Manhattan shooting portraits of noted actors and writers including William Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz, drag queen actor Divine, Susan Sontag, and Rolling Stone writer Vince Aletti. He visited and shot photos at the area’s bars and also the abandoned West Side piers on the Hudson River, a gathering spot for artists and the gay community. In early 1981, Hujar met filmmaker and artist David Wojnarowicz who had become one of the prolific members of the avant-garde artists who used mixed media, graffiti and street art. After a brief period as Hujar’s lover, Wojnarowicz became his protégé and remained closely linked to him for the remainder of Hujar’s life. 

Peter Hujar was a consummate technician and master of the darkroom who produce images that, though stripped of excess, were highly emotional. His photography covered a wide range of subjects, including abandoned and ruined buildings, cityscapes, animals, portraits, still life, and nudes. Due to his connection with the sitter, Hujar excelled in portrait work and was able to achieve an intimate and honest pose for the camera that caught his sitter’s idiosyncrasies and inner feelings. He never used props in his portraits and focused entirely on the sitter as opposed to the backdrop of the shot. 

Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS in January of 1987. Ten months later at the age of fifty-three, he died at New York’s Cabrini Medical Center on the twenty-fifth of November. Hujar’s funeral was held at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village; he was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In his lifetime, Hujar had few substantial solo exhibitions and attracted little notice by the press. His only major show in his lifetime was a 1986 exhibition of seventy photographs curated by Sur Rodney Sur of New York’s Gracie Mansion Gallery. 

Peter Hujar willed his entire artistic estate to novelist and historian Stephen Koch, a longtime friend. Since 1987, Koch has worked to place Hujar’s work in its rightful position in twentieth-century art. Photography curator Joel Smith assembled a collection of one hundred and sixty-four images from Peter Hujar’s work for a 2018 retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. Hujar’s work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and is housed in such public collection as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Notes: All images, unless noted, are from the Peter Hujar Archive which is located at: https://peterhujararchive.com

An exhibition of Paul Hujar’s work is currently being held at the Ukrainian Museum, 222 East 6th Street, New York City until the 1st of September, 2024. Article: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/peter-hujar-rialto-ukrainian-museum-2490813

An excellent 2018 article by the New Yorker’s longtime art critic Peter Schjeldahl, entitled “The Bohemian Rhapsody of Peter Hujar”, can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-bohemian-rhapsody-of-peter-hujar

New York’s Pace Gallery has an online conversation moderated by the gallery’s curatorial director Oliver Shultz, entitled “Cruising Utopia”, that coincided with its 2020 exhibition of Hujar’s intimate photographs of queer culture: https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/conversation-on-peter-hujar-video/

Top Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Self Portrait Jumping (1)”, 1974, Gelatin Silver Print, 63.2 x 58.1 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Second Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Christopher Street Pier #3”, 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Third Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “The Shareef Twins”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Fourth Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Gary Schneider in Contortion #1”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed”, 1973, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Jimmy DeSana

The Photography of Jimmy DeSana

Born in Detroit in November of 1949, Jimmy DeSana was an American artist and a key figure in New York City’s East Village punk art and New Wave scene in the 1970s and 1980s. His work, as a conceptual artist, conveyed that ers’s radical spirit and initiated a new approach to photographing the human body.

Born James Arthur DeSana, DeSana spent his early years in Atlanta, Georgia. His interest in photography began as a teenager through photographing the city’s suburban landscapes and both friends and acquaintances. DeSana studied at the University of Georgia where he he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1972. For his thesis, he printed the 1972 series “101 Nudes”, a collection of fifty-six halftone black and white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posed inside or just outside houses. The figures, friends as well as himself, were seen from different viewpoints and sometimes only partially. Those partial anatomical views were reminiscent of earlier abstract work created by visual artist Man Ray. 

In 1973, Jimmy DeSana relocated to New York City and settled in the vibrant East Village area of Manhattan. As a street photographer doing commercial assignments for magazines as well as occasional record-album commissions, he shot the musicians who habituated late-night clubs and bars. These portraits included punk and New Wave figures such as Debbie Harry, Billy Idol, Richard Hell, Laurie Anderson and others. This commercial work supported DeSana’s photographic artwork in the studio. He was also active in the new correspondence art movement in which artists mailed their work through chain letters. Mailed out in 1973, DeSana’s nude self-portrait was later featured in a 1974 magazine published by the Canada’s conceptual artist collective, General Idea. 

In 1978, DeSana’s photographs of the human body were shown in Washington D.C. at the “Punk Art” exhibition sponsored by the Washington Project for the Arts. In 1979, he had his first exhibition at the Stefanotti Gallery on West 57th Street in New York City. In the same year, DeSana published his first collection entitled “Submission”. a volume of surreal, queer and humorous images that  situated his life and art within the queer and counterculture experiences. The published volume was created in collaboration with author William S. Burroughs.

In 1980, Jimmy DeSana began to experiment with color photography. His “Suburban” series continued his use of human bodies twisted into androgynous sculptural forms that challenged the viewer. In this series, DeSana began to also photograph commonly found objects in staged surrealistic settings.The images of this exploration of sexuality, gender and consumer issues had almost a nightclub atmosphere with their powerful, almost garish, colors of vibrant greens, pinks and mauves. To create his staged tableaus, DeSana used tungsten lights that imbued the surrealistic scenes with unnatural pigments. 

Shortly after 1985, DeSana was diagnosed with HIV and began to experience its symptoms. Continuing his work, he began the “Remainders” series that marked a move from the human body toward abstracted objects. This series featured everyday objects, such as balloons and aluminum foil, seated in dreamlike atmospheres lit in spectral hues.

Jimmy DeSana died, at the age of forty, from an AIDS-related illness at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the twenty-seventh of July in 1990. He left his estate to photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons who, in collaboration with Salon 94 Gallery, managed the estate for nearly a decade. The DeSana estate is currently co-managed by Simmons and New York City’s contemporary P.P.O.W. Gallery, one of Manhattan’s longest-running galleries now based in the city’s Tribeca district.

The photography volume “Jimmy DeSana: Suburban” was published by Del Monico Books/Brooklyn Museum in 2015 and included texts by filmmaker Laurie Simmons as well as art curators Dan Nadel and Elisabeth Sussman. A 2022 edition entitled “Jimmy DeSana: Submission” was published, also by Del Monico, with texts by Simmons, author Drew Sawyer, and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak. The first museum retrospective of DeSana’s work, curated by Simmons and Drew Sawyer, was held in late 2022 at the Brooklyn Museum.

Notes: All images in the header group, unless noted otherwise, are from the Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Top Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Smoke: Self-Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Second Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cowboy Boots”, 1984, Vintage Cibachrome Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Third Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cardboard”, 1985, Silver Dye Bleach Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Graduation Cap), 1978, Polaroid Photo, Diego Cortez No Wave Collection, Cornell University

Gabrielle Garland

The Paintings of Gabrielle Garland

Born in New York City in 1968, Gabrielle Garland is an American painter whose work is centered on the elements of architecture, space, and design. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned her MFA from the University of Chicago. The daughter of artistic parents, Garland was influenced by her early participation in her mother’s profession of decorative painting. She currently resides in New York’s East Village and maintains a studio in Brooklyn. 

For the last decade, Garland has been creating a series of images based on rural American architecture. These surreal portraits of houses and apartments, devoid of people, feature exterior views seen from the street and interior scenes arranged with personal domestic furnishings. Executed with a bold palette, the paintings show a fluid, elastic perspective, often containing oblique angles, which gives each home a unique personality. Lacking distinctive architectural features or indications of geographical locations, these anthropomorphic structures could stand anywhere.

Gabrielle Garland has exhibited her work in many group and solo exhibitions at both galleries and public spaces. These include multiple solo shows at the Hap Gallery in Portland, Oregon; the 2014 exhibition at Chicago’s Logan Center; the 2015 group show at MoMA’s Clemente Soto Vélex Cultural Center; multiple showings at Expo Chicago curated by Corbett vs Dempsey; the 2018 Campbell Project Space exhibition in Sydney, Australia; the 2017 Postcards from the Edge: Benefit for Visual Aids held in New York City; and “Chasing Phantoms”, a group show in 2022 at The Pit in Los Angeles, among others. 

In addition to her paintings, Garland produced in 2014 the limited edition, black and white “Gabrielle Garland: Coloring Book”, created from a series of her drawings that became paintings of artists’ spaces. 

Gabrielle Garland’s website, which contains images of both paintings and drawings, as well as upcoming exhibitions and contact information, can be found at: http://www.gabriellegarland.org

Top Insert Image: Gabrielle Garland, “Untitled 160”, 2020, Acrylic on Canvas over Panel, 55.9 x 68.5 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Gabrielle Garland, Untitled 63 (Green Coffee Table), Oil on Panel, 40.6 x 50.8 cm,

Larry Stanton

The Portrait Work of Larry Stanton

Born in June of 1947 in Rockville Center on the south shore of Long Island, Larry Stanton was a portrait painter who was lived and worked  in Manhattan, New York. His father, a graduate of Columbia University and the Juilliard School of Music, moved his family in 1948 to a dairy farm in New York’s Catskill Mountains to provide a country environment for the family and a source of income for his work as a freelance music arranger. Due to the foundering of both the farm and his musical aspirations, Stanton’s father often experienced periods of frustration and temper which affected the family. However, despite the familial tensions, both he and Stanton’s mother encouraged and supported Stanton’s early artwork. 

After graduating high school, Larry Stanton studied on an art scholarship at New York City’s Cooper Union for one semester. He worked in the following months at various odd jobs including mailrooms and an ice cream parlor. During this period, Stanton embraced his gay identity and gained some notoriety in New York City’s gay community. He became acquainted with banker Arthur Lambert in the summer of 1967 and the two were immediately drawn to each other. Upon returning from a trip with Lambert to London, Stanton followed him in the fall of that year to Los Angeles, where Stanton took a new financial position. 

In February of 1968, Stanton enrolled in Los Angeles’s Art Center College of Design where he received his first formal training in drawing and painting. After applying himself intensely to his studies, he became convinced it was possible to make a career in art. During his time at the college, Stanton met many people who would become lifelong friends, including Alice Sulit, an art student from the Philippines, and English painter David Hockney. In the fall of 1968, Stanton traveled with Lambert to Hockney’s residence in London where he met another major influence on his life, Henry Geldzahler, the Curator of Contemporary Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

Upon the return to New York, Larry Stanton moved into a Manhattan rent-controlled apartment owned by his father, who was relocating to retire in Florida; Lambert returned to his financial work in California. With a scholarship from the New School, Stanton began  to study printmaking and drawing; his studies were further supported by a grant for printmaking from the Tiffany Foundation. In January of 1970, Stanton had his first exhibition of drawings at New York City’s Gotham Gallery. This show was followed by a period of travel, accompanied sometimes by Henry Geldzabler, to Italy, Tunisia and sub-Saharan Africa. Upon his return, Stanton found a basement studio space in the Italian section of Greenwich Village where he could continue his painting. 

In early 1972, Arthur Lambert moved back to New York and noticed a change in Stanton. Stanton had begun drinking alcohol more frequently and had become less committed to painting. He began to pursue filmmaking and produced a few films on David Hockney. Stanton also began bringing back to his place young men he met on his travels around the city. By late 1977, he was not socializing as much and complained of lingering feelings of anxiety. Stanton’s mother, with whom he had a close bond, succumbed from cancer in 1979 after a three year struggle. The loss of this bond, intensified by the depressive effects of his developed alcoholism, resulted in Stanton having a psychological collapse for which he needed hospitalization.

From this trauma, Larry Stanton emerged a sober, non-smoking artist with an intense commitment to his art. Stanton moved his studio to a larger location nearer his apartment which enabled him to work on larger canvases. By 1983, his studio was attracting young writers and artists who admired his work and sought his company. In his apartment and studio, Stanton created a series of portraits in charcoal, oil crayon, pencil, and pen, as well as paint, drawing friends, familial relations, and people he met while wandering the streets of New York. Many of the people who posed for him would later die from the AIDS epidemic.

Holly Solomon, a prominent art dealer, commissioned two portraits, one of herself and one of her son. She later placed two of Stanton’s oversized portraits in a group show at her Soho gallery. Following this show, Stanton’s work was given an exhibition at the Aaron Berman Gallery in Brooklyn. In 1984, his work was included in a major group exhibition at the Queens, New York, city-owned exhibition space, PS1, which focused on emerging new artists. Stanton’s work was also presented in a group exhibition at the East Village’s Magic Gallery. With these shows, his work was gaining increased attention as he developed a consistent quality and a mature personal style. 

Beginning in February of 1984, Larry Stanton began to have health problems, initially shingles and later periodic unpleasant skin rashes. After numerous tests, the doctors assured there were no signs of immunity problems; there were no specific AIDS testing at this time. In August, Stanton developed a persistent and sore throat and was diagnosed with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a fatal fungal infection of the lungs and major cause of death for people with HIV/AIDS. Larry Stanton died, at the age of thirty-seven, of AIDS-related illness on October 18th of 1984. 

After Larry Stanton’s  death, a collection of his work was shown at New York City’s Charles Cowles Gallery in 1987. From May through July of 2021, the Daniel Cooney Fine Art Gallery in the Chelsea area of New York City held “It Doesn’t Thunder Every Day”, an exhibition of twenty works on paper by Stanton that captured the faces of a generation of people lost in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic. Larry Stanton’s work is housed in the permanent collection of New York City’s  Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.

Notes: A full collection of Larry Stanton’s paintings and drawings, as well as personal tributes and remembrances by friends such as Arthur Lambert,  Henry Geldzahler and David Hockney, can be found at: http://www.larrystanton.net

A recent collection of poems by gay poet Winthrop Smith entitled “Take Down Portraits: Drawings and Portraits by Larry Stanton” was published by Chiron Review Press. Bringing the portraits back to life, Smith’s poems imagine the encounters between Stanton and his sitters, which reconstruct the experience of New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Larry Stanton”, circa 1968

Second Insert Image: Larry Stanton, “Man in Jockstrap”, circa Early 1970s, Pencil on Paper, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Arry Stanton in His Village Basement Studio”, circa 1981

Fourth Insert Image: Larry Stanton, “Joey”, 1975, Pencil on Paper, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “larry Stanton, Fire Island Pines”, circa 1980

Don Herron

The Photography of Don Herron

Born in Brenham, Texas in 1941, Don Herron was an American photographer. Upon graduating from high school in 1959, he served four years in the United States Air Force. Herron received his Bachelor of Arts, and later in 1972, his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught studio classes. He moved to San Francisco in the latter part of 1972. 

Inspired by medieval sculptures set in niches and largely self-taught, he began a series of portraits of people posed in bathtubs, which became known as the “Tub Shots”. Herron collaborated with his subjects and allowed them to stage the images. Some of his subjects simply sat in their empty bathtubs, while others wore costumes and created tableaux. The tubs were sometimes filled with water or styrofoam peanuts used for packing. Many of the subjects posed nude; others concealed themselves with bubbles or the limbs of mannequins. 

In 1978, Don Herron relocated to New York City where he became part of the East Village art scene. He continued his series of black and white images by photographing the members of its underground, bohemian community of artists. The “Tub Shots” series contains such personalities as painter Keith Haring, photographers Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, filmmaker Peter Berlin, playwrights and drag performers Charles Busch and Ethyl Eichelberger, and actress and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, among others. Through this work, Herron captured both the glamour and camp, as well as the joy and tragedy, that the community experienced in the 1970s.

Herron relocated in the middle of the 1980s to Newburgh, New York, where he became an active member of the Historical Society of Newburgh Bay and the Highlands. He settled in a historical 1836 Federal townhouse which had been designed by Thornton McNess Niven, a Scottish-American architect and master stonecutter who gained fame for his Gothic Revival and Italianate styles. Herron created accurate drawings of his and other historical buildings in the Newburgh area for publication in tour booklets. He also provided artwork for non-profit groups including Habitat for Humanity.

Don Herron also wrote newsprint articles for the Times Herald Record and the Mid-Hudson Times; his writings drew on his personal experiences, including his childhood in Texas and his confrontation with cancer. Don Lee Herron died on December 25th of 2012 at the Castle Point Veterans Administration Hospital surrounded by his many friends.

Herron’s  “Tub Shots” series has been published in New York’s Village Voice, the New York Magazine and in the art journal, Art Forum.  In 2018, the Daniel Cooney Gallery in the Chelsea district of Manhattan held a two month exhibition of Herron’s series which displayed sixty-five black and white photographs dated from 1978 to 1993.  Herron’s work is in the collections of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia; Connecticut’s Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; New York’s Tang Teaching Art Museum in Saratoga Springs; and the museums of the Universities of Texas, Louisiana, and Toronto. 

Note: Three articles on “Tub Shots” and Don Herron can be found at New York essayist and television producer Brian Ferrari’s informative blog site located at: https://brianferrarinyc.com

Top Insert Image: Don Herron, “Performer Winston Fong, San Francisco”, circa 1972-78, Tub Shots Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Middle Insert Image: Don Herron, Self Portrait, 1993, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Don Herron, “Actor Ethyl Sichelberger, NYC”, 1982, Tub Shot Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Joe Raskin

Urban Photography by Joe Raskin

Born in Queens, New York, Joe Raskin is a photographer, an avid urban explorer, and chronicler of New York City. He has posted on his blog over forty-eight thousand photographs of the greater New York City region, which he shot while wandering its boroughs over a period of seven years. Raskin primarily documents the varying architectural styles of the city’s buildings, but also shoots images of its subways and commuter railway lines. 

Raskin is a graduate of York College, City University of New York, where he majored in political science; he received his Masters Degree in Urban Studies from Queens College in New York. Although he attended a  photography class while at York College, Raskin considers himself self-taught. Originally starting with a Kodak Brownie camera, his primary equipment choices now are the digital Panasonic Lumix and the smaller, digital Casio Exilim. 

Prior to his retirement, Joe Raskin served as assistant director of Government and Community Relations at the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York. He is the author of a book on the history of New York’s subway system entitled “The Routes Not Taken; A Trip Though New York City’s Unbuilt Subway System”, published in 2013.  Now a resident of the Chelsea neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan, Raskin previously lived  over thirty years in the neighborhoods of Sunnyside, Rochdale Village, and Astoria. 

Influences on Raskin’s work include the works of Arnold Eagle, a photographer and cinematographer known for his socially concerned photographs of the 1930s and 1940s; Todd Webb, whose photographs documented architecture and everyday life in cities; and, in particular, the work of Berenice Abbott, best known for her photographs of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s. A portrait photographer of cultural figures from 1920 to 1940, Abbott was a central figure between the photographic circles and cultural hubs of Paris and New York.

A life-long history buff, Raskin’s photographs document how New York City grew in  its expansion from just the downtown areas into each of the boroughs. This expansion was, in a large part, enabled by the rapid growth of its extensive subway and rail systems. Although Raskin documents many historical, architectural styles of buildings, he finds classic city housing, such as Art Deco Bronx apartment houses, Mathews Model Flats row houses, and brownstones and townhouses, the most intriguing to photograph. 

“I’ve always looked at the paintings of Edward Hopper and the photographs of Berenice Abbott as a reference point for my photographs. They seemed to be more intent on showing the environment of an area. When a person was in Abbott’s photographs or many of Hopper’s paintings, they were part of the overall scene, rather than the subject. If someone shows up in one of my photographs, it’s more of an incidental matter more than anything else. They’re part of the background, a component of the overall scene.” 

—Joe Raskin, Art in New York City, July 2012

Joe Raskin’s photographs can be found on his blog located at:  https://wanderingnewyork.tumblr.com

Top Insert Image: Joe Raskin, “North View of 90th Street, Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights”, Queens, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Joe Raskin, “Apartment Building, Highbridge”, Bronx, New York

Carl Van Vechten

Bessie_Smith_(1936)_by_Carl_Van_Vechten

Carl Van Vechten, ” Bessie Smith Holding Feathers”, 3 February 1936, Restored by Adam Cuerden, Library of Congress

Accomplished photographer, Carl Van Vechten was an author, critic, and a supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists. After moving to New York City, he was hired by The New York Times as an assistant to the music critic. In 1908 Van Vechten became the Paris correspondent for The New York Times, returning in 1909 to become the first American critic of modern dance. In the period from 1913 to 1914, he worked as the drama critic for the Times.

In the early 1930s, Carl Van Vechten began photographing his large circle of friends with a 35 mm Leica camera, given to him by the Mexican painter Miguel Covarrubias. His earlier career as a writer with the New York Times and his theater connection through his actress wife provided him with access to new and established artists and cultural figures of the time. His portraits were usually busts or half-length poses in front of backdrops, using an assistant for lighting setups but developing his own photographs.

His portfolio of photographic works was a ‘who’s who” of America’s cultural icons of the early to middle 1900s. His portfolio includes images of Eugene O”Neill, Gertrude Stein, actress Anna May Wong, Langston Hughes, Pearl Bailey, and many others. His works were exhibited at Bergdorf Goodman in 1933, at the annual Leica Eshibitions between 1934 and 1936, and at Museum of the City of New York in 1942 and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1951.

Carl Van Vechten felt srongly that his work documenting the period of the 1900s should be availabe for scholarly research. With that in mind, he donated, during his lifetime, his collection of manuscripts, clippings, letters, and photographs to several university libraries. He remained an active photographer and writer until his death in 1964. The Library of Congress acquired Van Vechten’s assistant of twenty years Saul Mauriber’s collection of 1,400 photographs in 1966. The Museum of the City of New York also holds an extensive collection of over 2,000 images.

Top Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Self Portrait”, May 8 1934, Gelatin Silver Print, Van Vechten Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Actress Amy May Wong”, 1932, Gelatin Silver Print, Van Vechton Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC

Harry Sternberg

Harry Sternberg, “The Atom”, 1949, Aquatint, 44 x 25 cm, Private Collection

Harry Sternberg, painter, lithographer and educator was born on July 19, 1904 in New York City. At the age of nine he began to take art classes at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. From 1922 until 1926 he trained at the Arts Students League in New York. He rented his first studio in 1926 and began his career in etching, printmaking and painting.

During the depression Sternberg was a WPA artist, and his murals are in post offices in Chicago, Chester and Sellersville, Pennsylvania. From 1934 to 1968, he taught painting and graphics at the Art Students League in New York. He taught printmaking from 1942 to 1945 at the New School of Social Research. Sternberg was head of the Art Department in the Idylwild School of Music and Art at the University of Southern California from 1959 to 1969. He also wrote several books on graphics, including silk screening, etching and woodcutting.

Sternberg received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936 and his work was included in the first Whitney Museum Invitational Annual in 1937. During this period, Sternberg was friendly with Mexican artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, and David Siqueiros. Other artist- friends were Jacob Lawrence, Philip Evergood, and John Sennhauser, and the older artists, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley and Max Weber.

Note: A more extensive biography and additional artwork by Sternberg can be found in the January, 2022, archive of this site.

Ogle Winston Link and Thom

Photographer Unknown, “Ogle Winston Link and Thom”, 1940, Silver Gelatin Print

This 1940 photograph shows O. Winston Link with his assistant Thom with their lighting equipment.

Ogle Winston Link was an American photographer known for his black and white photography and sound recordings of the last days of steam locomotive railroading on the Norfolk and Western lines in the United States in the late 1950s. He was a pioneer in night-time photography. He used a 4 x 5 graphic View view camera with black and white film, from which he produce silver gelatin prints.

Sean Landers

Sean Landers, “Painted Desert (Markhor)”, 2015, Oil on Linen, 86 x 64 Inches

Born in 1962 in Palmer, Massachusetts, Sean Landers received his B.F.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1984, and his M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art in 1986. He currently lives and works in New York City,

Sean Landers is an American conceptual artist, best known for using his personal experience as public subject matter and for utilizing diverse styles and media in a performative manner. Through the use of multiple mediums, Landers reveals the process of artistic creation through humor and gravity , reality and fantasy.

Guy Jones, “1911: A Trip Through New York City”: Film History Series

Guy Jones, “1911: A Trip Through New York City”

Videographer Guy Jones edited century-old film to more accurately match the video standards of the present day. For the black and white clip of New York City in 1911 shown above, Jones slowed down the film’s original speed and added ambient sound to match the activity seen on the city’s streets. The subtle additions allow for a more engaging experience when viewing of the 20th-century footage, and presents the urban milieu in a more realistic light.

This particular film print was created by the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern company during a trip to America, and remains in mint condition.