(Some photos of male bodies and allusions to sex between men, but no naughty bits and no street language — just not to everyone’s taste)
The end tag to a New York Times story, “At Frieze, Photographer of Gay Life Seeks ‘a Place in the Sunshine’: Stanley Stellar has documented gay New York, on the streets and in his studio, for decades. Now he steps onto his biggest stage”, by Erik Piepenburg, on-line on the NYT website on 5/3 (in print on 5/4); from the story:
From May 1-5 [AZ: yes, the event is now over; my life has been difficult, and I’m doing the best that I can], Stellar will step onto possibly his biggest stage when Kapp Kapp, the queer-centered TriBeCa gallery run by the twin brothers Sam and Daniel Kapp, shows his work at Frieze New York, the annual international art fair that returns to the Shed at Hudson Yards.
On view will be 15 of Stellar’s “Piers” photographs: assertive portraits and lazy-day snapshots of the mostly gay men who claimed the decrepit West Side piers as social and sexual turf in the 1970s and ’80s. Many photographs will be shown in color for the first time; “Stanley Stellar: The Piers,” a related book of photos, has been reprinted timed to the fair.
(#1) “Piers Roof July 1, 1978”
Continuing the piers section of the NYT story:
Other, more acclaimed artists made art at, and out of, the piers: David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Keith Haring, Gordon Matta-Clark. The Kapp brothers hope Frieze will do for Stellar what the Bronx Museum did in 2019 with its career-defining retrospective of Alvin Baltrop, whose photographs of the piers had been largely unheralded.
“Stanley doesn’t fit really cleanly into the narrative of what people want a New York City gay photographer to be,” said Sam Kapp, who joined his brother on video for an interview. “That’s where we’ve seen our position from the start: how do we contextualize this legend as he deserves to be?”
Among Stellar’s fans is the writer and filmmaker Leo Herrera, whose work explores the AIDS generation. He said he admired the photographer’s “overall love and appreciation — a shameless appreciation — of gay male beauty and gay sexuality during a time when we are facing the same censorship of the ’70s and the stigma of the ’80s, just on different platforms.”
As grateful as Stellar is to be at Frieze, behind his mile-a-minute monologues, he’s got a question: What took so long?
“I know that everyone wants to focus on the piers, the piers, the piers,” he said. “I’m just too big to focus only on the piers.”
… Like Hujar, a good friend, Stellar was a habitué at the piers, but says he was there to cruise and have sex as much as to take pictures in the plein-air studio.
“We never had a place in the sunshine, a place in the light — there was no place for us to see each other,” he said. “And then there was.”
And now the beginning of the NYT piece.
Stanley Stellar was on Canal Street one Sunday morning in 1976 when a young man with a killer body passed by. Like many New York street photographers, Stellar is curious, bordering on nosy, and he can, when necessary, be a whiz at masking flirtation as flattery to put straight guys at ease.
Stellar convinced the man to lift his T-shirt for a photo, and in return Stellar got an eyeful of chest and colorful bird tattoos, a picture Stellar later named “I Got Birds Too.”
(#2) “I Got Birds Too,” 1976The man’s shirt went back on and a lightbulb went off.
“I walked away from this and went, oh, this is who I am,’” Stellar, 79, said in a recent interview at his TriBeCa apartment.
That chance encounter was an awakening that helped fuel Stellar’s decades-long drive to take pictures of unapologetic, maverick gayness as much as he can fit into a day. He’s still at it, as his nearly 40,000 Instagram followers can testify.
Some background. From my 5/11 posting “The gay handshake”,
on Stanley Stellar’s career in male photography …, during which he has amassed a trove of tens of thousands of photos, almost all set in NYC (and is still at it). One part of his work is devoted to depicting the beauty of the male body; for this he solicits men to pose for him (that’s why his e-mail address is on his website). These men are of various sexualities.
(#3) Cover of his 1992 Bruno Gmümder collection Stellar MenThe remainder of his work he thinks of photographing the gay community:
— chronicling Pride parades (in all their complexity)
(#4) From the 2008 Pride parade— showing street life in gay neighborhoods and at locations of gay sociability — both places populated by an assortment of lgbt+ people, plus some others
— and recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public … including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC
And for some basic information and a bit of p.r., from Stellar’s own website:
Brooklyn native Stanley Stellar [born in 1945] was educated at Parsons School of Design [in Manhattan] where he focused on graphic design and photography. Stellar’s photography has been exhibited in galleries in the U.S. and Europe, presented and discussed in over a dozen anthologies, and featured on the covers of 26 international magazines. The Beauty of All Men, Photographs 1976-2011, a monograph, was published by All Saints Press.
Stellar photographs the visual culture of men, creating a depth and humanity in his photographs. One senses the person and not just the body. Being one of the photographers of the early period of gay liberation, many of his images from that time have become icons of that history.
He lives and works in Manhattan.
With the exception of the recent reprint of the Piers volume, all his books seem to be out of print. However, his website has slide shows with samples of his work from five decades: the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s.