Every emerging minority needs not only a record of its grievances but also an idealized image of its expectations. Tom Bianchi has given us one version of gay happiness – an earthly paradise where handsome men love one another on white sands under an eternally cloudless sky. These photographs are at once formal and intimate, for they bring both rigor and tenderness to glimpses of real people. – Edmund White
Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983, by the celebrated lawyer-turned-artist Tom Bianchi, contains dozens of exuberantly playful and homoerotic SX-70 Polaroid images taken between 1975 and 1983. Bianchi documented the gay community at play in one of the few places where they then could openly be gay men – Fire Island Pines. The photographs in this exhibition at Throckmorton Fine Art in New York are whimsical and playful. Yet they also harken to the long tradition in art of celebrating the male physique.
The Pines is a mile-long sliver of some 600 modest and grand houses on a 36-mile long barrier island 60 miles east of Manhattan along the Long Island coast. Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983 is an homage to the free-spirited community that was Fire Island Pines in what is often called the “golden” age in the 1970s.
The Pines was a refuge for as many as 10,000 gay men each weekend who pulled their little red wagons from the harbor to their homes and reveled at afternoon “Tea Dances” and legendary bacchanals. For many it was their first chance to openly walk hand to hand on the beach with a romantic partner.
“Every emerging minority needs not only a record of its grievances but also an idealized image of its expectations,” says American novelist and critic Edmund White. “Tom Bianchi has given us one version of gay happiness – an earthly paradise where handsome men love one another on white sands under an eternally cloudless sky. These photographs are at once formal and intimate, for they bring both rigor and tenderness to glimpses of real people.”
The moving memoir Bianchi wrote for Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983, together with the photographs, recorded the birth and development of a new culture at a critical time in America’s political and aesthetic life. Much of the good we see accomplished today for gay civil liberties and queer consciousness began on the beach at Fire Island. Bianchi was there, ensuring that the beauty of the moment would live on.
Tom Bianchi’s Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983
June 29 – Sept 16, 2017
Throckmorton Fine Art
145 East 57th Street, third floor
New York, NY 10022
USA
