GAYLETTER

Fred W. McDarrah was the first on-staff photographer for the Village Voice. His prolific photography captured both the pride and the struggles of the gay community toward the end of the 20th century. In 1994 McDarrah published a book of photographs focused on the changing queer community in Greenwich Village from the events of Stonewall up to the mid-1990s. 25 years later, a new, redesigned edition of McDarrah’s book has been released by OR Books — Pride: Photographs After Stonewall with a foreword by Hilton Als. It is no coincidence that the book was released this year, exactly 50 years after the Stonewall Riots. The book’s cover features several rioters and Stonewall patrons posing for a photograph during the riots. Above them, a message etched in chalk reads, “To fight for our country, they invaded our rights.”

Pride is split into two parts: photographs before Stonewall and photographs after Stonewall. The before section paints a vibrant picture of queer 1960s New York. Gay poets and writers like Frank O’Hara, W.H. Auden, and James Baldwin pose for portraits, a powerful photograph of the American transsexual icon Candy Darling, drag queens and transgender women competing in the Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant of 1967 are photographed wearing identical outfits and sashes that display their title.  Actor-turned-activist, Jim Fouratt summarizes the decade: “I came to New York in the early ‘60s to be a bohemian/beatnik artist. I found the Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg, Greenwich Village, jazz, mary jane, gay bars, drag queens, Andy Warhol, the Judson Church performers, the Living Theater, the Caffe Cino and La Mama, civil rights marches and sit-ins, the Open Theater, Communist, poetry, dirty old men, Lenny Bruce, rich people, and my first real boyfriend. …

Is beauty only skin deep? In considering how our world of social media and dating apps pushes us to have a certain idea of beauty and desire, Paris-based photographer Jonathan Icher attempts to answer this question. His new series, Send Nudes depicts models with their organs on display. “Models with perfect figures pose naked and offer a new degree of intimacy. Their smooth and perfected organs are offered on display without reserve. Sometimes in excessive proportions, they try to provoke our envy.” Icher is responding to how easy it is to present yourself as perfect on social media with filters and editing. In planning this project, Jonathan posed the question, What’s the next step? How can we make our bodies even more perfect and attractive? “I imagined that the inside of the body, guts and organs, could be the new way to show our fake perfection in a new media. Organs are presented in this series, perfect, really clean and bright on the bodies.”

There’s a sexual element to Icher’s perfectly proportioned organs. In some photographs, organs like the heart, intestines, and lungs are excessively large and sit outside of the body. Like muscles, butts, and bulges, their large scale attracts sexual attention from the viewer. This was Jonathan’s first time using organs in his work, but he’s incorporated the human body and body modifications in previous projects. Jonathan loves to mix sexiness with weirdness. “Most of the time we are attracted to certain kinds of bodies (depending on what the fashion or porn industry is showing us) and I like to confront these kinds of bodies with something strange, or….not …