David Armstrong gained critical attention for his intimate and sharply focused portraits of men, friends and lovers. In the nineties, he began to photograph cityscapes and landscapes in soft focus to contrast with the resolution of his portraits: street lights, street corners and urban signage were elaborated into a soft blur.
With 615 Jefferson Avenue, Armstrong returns to the subject of his youth. The photographer’s first monograph in ten years, it gathers portraits of young boys taken in his turn-of-the-century row house in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Lowkey in their eroticism, these images always aim for a tangible, evident contact with their subjects; “It always has been this act of seduction,where you are trying to get the subjects to reveal themselves before the camera,” as Armstrong put it in a recent New York Times interview.
The rooms in which Armstrong shoots are painted in rich, dense, mint greens and browns, matching the period of the house itself, so that an atmosphere of enveloping interior catches the outlines of these boys, posed upon the many couches that fill Armstrong’s home. Filled with the excitement of rediscovering familiar terrain anew, this volume collects 120 of Armstrong’s color and black-and-white portraits.
David Armstrong was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. He attended the Boston Museum School and Cooper Union, and he earned a B.F.A from Tufts University in 1988. His photographs have been included in numerous group exhibitions including the 1995 Whitney Biennial and Emotions and Relations at the Hamburger Kunsthalle.He has realized advertising campaigns for a variety of clients, including Zegna, Rene Lezard, Kenneth Cole, Burburry, Puma, and Barbara Bui. David Armstrong lives in New York.
Emiliana Tedesco
