{"id":258218,"date":"2025-07-12T06:22:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T06:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/258218\/"},"modified":"2025-07-12T06:22:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T06:22:11","slug":"david-armstrongs-magnetic-portraits-of-1970s-countercultural-icons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/258218\/","title":{"rendered":"David Armstrong\u2019s magnetic portraits of 1970s countercultural icons"},"content":{"rendered":"

A young man in a pale shirt, arms crossed, expression pensive, gazes downwards \u2013 and somehow inwards \u2013 against an empty wall. Sunlight illuminates his figure from the top left-hand corner, lending a soft chiaroscuro to the monochrome portrait. Nearby, a baby-faced Nan Goldin<\/a> stares candidly at the camera, curly hair ruffled by the ocean wind, hands tucked into her jacket pockets. These two works are among a curation of captivating black-and-white portraits that greet visitors as they enter the newly opened retrospective of the late American photographer David Armstrong at Luma in Arles, coinciding with this year\u2019s Rencontres d\u2019Arles photography festival. They are emblematic of Armstrong\u2019s oeuvre: delicate yet raw, intimate yet exquisitely composed, an encapsulation of the youthful beauty, rebellion and introspection of his generation.<\/p>\n

Armstrong was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1954. An early encounter with Nan Goldin at the age of 14 would prove formative for both artists, who became lifelong friends. Both numbered among the so-called Boston School of photographers, alongside Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Mark Morrisroe et al, and both relocated to New York\u2019s Lower East Side in the late 1970s, where they became part of a unique scene, aptly described in the exhibition\u2019s text as \u201ca refuge for the dispossessed, for artists, poets, musicians and misfits of all kinds\u201d. This world \u2013 a world of drug-fuelled hedonism, of sexual freedom and gender fluidity \u2013 would form the basis of both artists\u2019 work over the following years. Yet Armstrong never received the same acclaim as Goldin in his lifetime, in spite of a number of important exhibitions \u2013 including one at the Rencontres d\u2019Arles in 2009, the year that Goldin served as guest artistic director \u2013 and late success as a fashion photographer in the years preceding his death in 2014.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Pin<\/a>\"DavidDavid Armstrong,, David Armstrong Archive, \u201cNan, Provincetown\u201d (Late 1970s)
\nVintage Gelatin Silver Print
\n24 x 20 inCourtesy of the Estate of David Armstrong<\/p>\n

\u201cGoldin\u2019s work is very immediate; at times it\u2019s as if the camera doesn\u2019t exist, which is what made it so shocking, so notable at the time,\u201d explains Matthieu Humery, who co-curated the Luma show alongside the artist Wade Guyton, a friend of Armstrong\u2019s who runs the photographer\u2019s archive. Armstrong, on the other hand, took a more painterly approach, Humery says. \u201cHe actually studied painting first and was very into art history. He didn\u2019t do a huge amount of preparation for his photographs, but these aren\u2019t snapshots taken right away. He always took the time to compose the scene.\u201d It is this, the curator suggests, that upon first glance gives the work a more classical appearance \u2013 \u201cperhaps that\u2019s why it drew less attention at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you look closer, however, Armstrong\u2019s style is wonderfully distinct, full of texture and detail, and it only grew stronger throughout his career. \u201cHe had a vision: once he got somewhere \u2013 a bedroom, a park, a beach \u2013 he saw how he\u2019d place the figure within the space, he knew how to deal with the light, the character and the environment all together,\u201d Humery remarks, pointing to a series of display cases filled with hundreds of Armstrongs\u2019 contact sheets. Indeed, in most of these, the same set-up is captured a number of times, with only slight variations in pose or angle. Particularly charming is the fact that Armstrong often pops up among the negatives in moments where his subjects, almost always close acquaintances, have picked up the camera and snapped him in return. \u201cEveryone always wanted to be close to David,\u201d Guyton says during a preview of the show. \u201cAnd you can tell!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Pin<\/a>\"DavidDavid Armstrong, David Armstrong Archive, \u201cMillie at Home, New York City\u201d (1979
\n\u00c9preuve g\u00e9latino-argentique d’\u00e9poque
\n20 x 16 inCourtesy of the Estate of David Armstrong<\/p>\n

The majority of the exhibition is made up of Armstrong\u2019s portraits, featuring artists (think: Christopher Wall and trans icon Greer Lankton), actors (Cookie Mueller and Vincent Gallo<\/a>), and \u2013 one can assume from their state of rumpled undress \u2013 Armstrong\u2019s lovers. But there are early diaristic images too, caught on Kodachrome and closer to Goldin in style, presented as slideshows in an adjacent room. These are taken from Armstrong\u2019s series Night and Day, captured in New York in the 70s as he and his pals got dressed up for, and attended, the city\u2019s infamous parties. A selection of the photographer’s landscapes are also on view: hazy, lyrical pictures of buildings in New York and Berlin made during the height of the Aids pandemic that stole the lives of so many of Armstrong and Goldin\u2019s friends. \u201cFor me, these are his way of translating this melancholia,\u201d says Humery. \u201cThe idea of disappearing, of being alone and seeing the landscape seeming to fade away.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Humery, it was particularly important to show Armstrong\u2019s work at this year\u2019s festival. \u201cI really felt a sense of urgency,\u201d he says. \u201cSome of the portraits in the show could have been taken today,\u201d he notes. \u201cNot ten years ago \u2013 from 2000 to 2010, that was another world \u2013 but now we\u2019ve returned to a climate where the same questions around gender identity are arising, the same political conservatism has taken hold. In the 70s, when Armstrong started making these portraits of this community, America was still very conservative, and this was a community centred on freedom. Of course, they paid a high price for this freedom with the AIDS crisis and the problems with addiction many of them faced, but it is an extremely powerful and relevant moment to revisit this work.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Armstrong<\/a> is at Luma, Arles, until October 5, 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A young man in a pale shirt, arms crossed, expression pensive, gazes downwards \u2013 and somehow inwards \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[2606,4021,4020,17098,17097,17099,17100,17101,17102,17103,4022,77,2584,3063,17095,17096,269,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-258218","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-dazed","12":"tag-dazed-confused","13":"tag-dazed-confused-magazine","14":"tag-dazed-and-confused","15":"tag-dazed-and-confused-magazine","16":"tag-dazedconfused","17":"tag-dazeddigital","18":"tag-design","19":"tag-entertainment","20":"tag-fashion","21":"tag-film","22":"tag-ideas","23":"tag-ideas-sharing-network","24":"tag-music","25":"tag-uk","26":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114838827735751685","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}