Art gay photography
These Photos Capture the “Gay Paradises” of 1980s America
Art & PhotographyIn Their Words
As his new publication is released, Nicholas Blair talks about capturing the heat and hedonism of the queer communities in 1980s San Francisco and Recent York
TextMadeleine Pollard
In the late 70s, homosexual life began to spill out onto the streets of San Francisco’s Castro District, rapidly eclipsing the hippies as the most apparent counter-culture movement of the day. People came to glimpse and be seen, tease, cruise, and congregate in universal as a group. “It was this outburst of pent-up celebration,” says Nicholas Blair, who was living in a free-love arts commune across town at the time. “It felt like the door of tolerance was opening and people were leaning in, hard, to live as their true selves.”
With a Leica rangefinder camera loaned to him by a childhood friend, Blair walked through this so-called “gay paradise”, capturing everything from the mundane to the profane. He photographed individuals dressed head-to-toe in fetish gear, others who preferred to communicate in more subtle codes and winks, and the everyday passersby who moved around them. Between 1979 and 1986, he followed
A beautiful group of photographs that spans a century (1850–1950) is part of a new guide that offers a visual glimpse of what life may own been like for those men, who went against the commandment to find love in one another’s arms. In Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850s–1950s, hundreds of images tell the story of admire and affection between men, with some clearly in love and others hinting at more than just friendship. The collection belongs to Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, a married couple who has accumulated over 2,800 photographs of “men in love” during the course of two decades. While the majority of the images hail from the United States and are of predominantly white men, there are images from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Latvia, and the Combined Kingdom among the cache.
What perform images of men in devote during a time when it was illegal tell us? What are we looking for in the faces of these people who dared to challenge the mores of their time to seek solace together? Flipping through the book, it wasn’t that I felt that I learned a great deal about entity LGBTQ, but what gave me comfort was the feeling that we
Between 1977 and 1979, American artist Hal Fischer created Gay Semiotics, a landmark series of photo-text works providing a pioneering examination of gay historical vernacular as it unfolded on the streets of San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Asbury districts. Inspired by the work of August Sander, Fischer made a series of street black and white portraits of homosexual archetypes accompanied by sms that deftly deconstructed the symbols of the era’s quintessential looks such as Natural, Classical, Jock, Hippie, Urbane, Forties Trash, Western, Leather, Dominance, and Submission – along with detailed descriptions of signifiers like keys, earrings, handkerchiefs, leather apparel, gag mask, amyl nitrate, and other bondage devices. In advance of the publication of The Same-sex attracted Seventies, Fischer looks advocate on one of the first conceptual works to bring the structuralism and linguistics to photography and reflects on the essence of gay semiotics today.
“I came to San Francisco for graduate school but I arrived in an extraordinary time. It was called ‘the centre of the gay universe’ in my book and I was part and parcel of the freedom of all of that. The beauty of the 1970s, particularly in C Some LGBTQA+ artists hold achieved world-renowned fame: Tom of Finland, David Hockney, Claude Cahun, and Glück, to name a few. However, there are many others whose work is less well-known but who provide vital glimpses into the lives and struggles of their people. These artists showcase the sexual, secretive, radical/political, and heart wrenching-moments that many, if not all, members in the community have experienced. Moreover, there is still a stigma that clouds over both LGBTQA+ artists and the art itself. Fortunately, here at Thomas J. Watson Library, we collect an encyclopedic and comprehensive collection of materials on the history of art in the world. Our online catalogue provides a great starting place to find an ample amount of materials to search LGBTQA+ art. Here are a scant to get you started! Jarrett Key is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. In his artist's book Trans (see above), Key explores signs and symbols with relation to transgender and gender identities and public restrooms. Zanele Muholui is a South African artist whose photobook, Faces and Phases, presents portraits of black woman loving woman women, trans-men, and gay men, who are resisting