Cult photographer David Armstrong: who we lost
Olesya Iva
Last saturday ages 60 years of life left the photographer David Armstrong - master of the genre portrait, cult photographer and artist of the 80s, who united fashion c visual arts. Armstrong was one of the pioneers of the documentary portrait genre and was part of the Boston School group along with Jack Pearson, Mark Morrisro and Nan Goldin - together they studied painting at the Boston School of Fine Arts.
C Nan Goldin David met when he was 14 years old, and their friendship has not been interrupted throughout his career. It was on the initiative of Goldin that he moved from Boston to New York. In the 70s and 80s, they filmed a series of intimate and contemplative portraits of the bohemian party of New York at that time and its strange and not always happy heroes — 35 gs — and 35 mm camera and its strange and not always happy heroes - gays, models, dancers, heroines. Among them were portraits of cult artists of the 80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Philip-Lorca Di Corsia. The recognition came to David immediately, in 1981, when his work was included in the exhibition "New York / New Wave" in the New York Center for Contemporary Art MoMA PS1. In 1994, David and Nan released a joint album "A Double Life", documenting the era of the AIDS epidemic. David himself said that their photos filled a certain point in the story: "AIDS came before people think. My boyfriend died of AIDS in 1983. You see someone now, but not the fact that you will see tomorrow." Obviously, with this thought, they filmed.
Genre portrait, suggesting a reflection of the character of the hero and his world in their entirety - the main thing that made David famous Armstrong loved working with natural light and soft focus. He said: "Portrait is concentration. If you want to get a deep connection, you need to focus on one person." For ten years, from 2001 to 2011, David created a series of decadent and sensual portraits of handsome young men. Black and white portraits became central in his work and published in the book "615 Jefferson Avenue". “My work is about male youth, which disappears with time. I’m getting old, but I still shoot the same beautiful young men I shot when I first started,” says Armstrong.
David came to fashion photography relatively late. In 2001, young designer Edie Sliman invited Armstrong to shoot the backstage of the Dior Homme show, after which endless shooting orders for magazines like Vogue Homme, AnOther Man, Self Service, Acne Paper, POP, 10 Magazine, LOVE and Purple magazine fell on him. In addition to editorials, he filmed advertising campaigns of such houses as Rodarte, Burberry, Alexander Wang and Bottega Veneta. Armstrong was sarcastic about fashion: “Brands don't want to see pure emotions in their ad campaigns, especially if they are negative. They want something artificial that is impossible to achieve from me.”
The work of photographers "Boston School" and David Armstrong influenced the handwriting of important contemporary fashion photographers like Ryan McGinley and Wolfgang Tillmans. So, McGinley compares his work with paintings by Jan Vermeer, author of the Girl with a Pearl Earring, who in the 17th century worked with a genre portrait: “Armstrong, like Vermeer, knows how to work with sunlight. His pictures are about desire and despair. You see it in the eyes of his heroes. " Armstrong himself said in an interview with The New York Times: "I think about classical Renaissance painting, where melancholy or longing has always been present. This is the axis of my work, and they are not about sex."
Throughout his life, David had problems with drugs and alcohol. In recent years, he struggled with liver cancer, but lost.