In 1983, it began with a rumor. Some mystery illness. They called it 'gay cancer.' In less than five years, the rumor became the AIDS epidemic, which would decimate the world's artistic community. In 1993, with David Schoenauer, Carol Squiers and Andy Grundberg, we decided to devote a s...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

The statistics are grim : one american in 250 infected with HIV. More Americans dead of AIDS than died in both the Vietnam and Korean wars. But numbers are insufficient. What they don't tell us is that many of these precious lives made our lives richer, and that the collective ...

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Four years ago Robert Mapplethorpe died - on March 9, 1989, to be exact. Robert was very exacting. You can sense that in his work, which has a precision that always makes his photographs recognizable. Looking back, his certainty about one of his subjects homosexuality in art-shows...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

Ken was the only art director I ever worked with who could do backflips. At times of great stress he would backflip into the art room (he had been an amateur gymnast) and diffuse the tension. Ken was this amazing bundle of energy. He respected photography immensely, and it showed in his layouts. After he...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

Sam Wagstaff was the supreme aesthete of his generation. Singlehandedly, and with an unparalleled intensity, he transformed the collecting of photography in this country from an idiosyncratic indulgence into an intellectual pursuit worthy of widespread recognition. He was a natural arist...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

With the loss of David Wojnarowicz, the world is a much lonelier place. His childhood and teenage years were some kind of nightmarish perversion of the American Dream, but out of great pain he created brilliant art and literature. The work he left behind, though, doesn't begin to re...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

John Kobal was a lover, a discoverer, and a savior. His boundless admiration of the silver screen made a young, shy boy the intimate chronicler of the stars. It was that flair which took him into the attics of has been actresses and the abandoned sound stages of Hollywood studios to uncove...

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"Be tough" is what he used to tell me all the time. He was known for his loud bark, but everyone who knew him discovered his big heart and great eyes. He had an eye for grand indulgence in a photograph something that reached out to people and said, Just have a great time. When I first met him at GQ mag...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

Peter Hujar is in many ways the prototypical lost photographer of the AIDS generation. Revered by critics, intellectuals, and photographers as diverse as Richard Avedon and Lynn Davis, his work influenced many but is known by few. For Hujar, New York was the perfect subject. Whereas most ...

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Jimmy was a quiet, elusive character who never signed his name the same way twice and claimed to have been born in 1949, 1950, and 1951. James, Jimmy, Jim De Sana, De Sana intimidated many people with his dark, quiet presence. But once he was your friend he was loyal and loving, a chatty southern gentle...

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The inestimable Tina Chow - five lines to sum up a living sculpture of porcelain perfection: delicacy and strength, courage and character, soigné, taste, humor, wisdom endurance, lissome grace and deep beauty ... a petunia in an onion patch .... And my lifelong frustration for never having ...

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Antonio discovered me in Paris and taught me a great deal about posing and modeling. He introduced me to a lot of people. He was a very talented artist, and we miss him. Fashion designer Norma Kamali once referred to Antonio Lopez as "the John Singer Sargent of our times." He redefined the craft of fash...

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Robert Hayes was in the vanguard of the new glamour photography of the 1970s. In the social sphere of that time, there was a new meritocracy at work in which uptown flirted with downtown at Studio 54, where sports figures mixed with debutantes, who in turn mixed with business tycoons and...

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One very hot summer's day a long Time ago, I was walking up Third Avenue and coming towards me was a wonderful figure dressed in black and white. I remember thinking, before I realized who it was, that here was someone with super style - someone who knew how to look good in that terrible humidity and heat. ...

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The rediscovery in the early 1970s of French "primitive photography" as highly desirable art led many museum curators and private collectors to a small glass-walled treasure trove buried in the Paris flea market at Porte de Clignancourt. This modest establishment-bookstalls...

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At first glance, the photography of Bernard Pierre Wolff seems to be in the tradition of postwar photojournalism. Like the Magnum photographers, and Henri Cartier-Bresson in particular, Wolff always felt that the talent of the photographer was to impose a latent order on that rea...

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Why is Bill King memorable to me? If you'd known Bill, you'd know why.He was one of the best photographers I ever worked with; he brought to his work professionalism and creativity, and always his own inimitable style. I have yet to meet a photographer who can put energy and sophistication ...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

Even among the brightest art-world luminaries. Jack Boulton's mixture of up-to-date information, boundless energy, and diplomatic charm was impressive. In the l970s he began curating shows at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati that featured the most topical and challenging new-ge...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

Joe Macdonald and I met in the mid-1970s, a heady time for photography. He had just begun collecting seriously. He was a wonderfully good-looking man who achieved astonishing success as a model in Paris and had recently moved to New York to broaden his career. We lived near each other, ...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

GQ hired Barry to do many shoots during the time I was associate art director there. Barry was always a complete perfectionist and was usually very difficult to get along with. But when we'd return home and look at the pictures, they would be so beautiful that we would always book him again.Barry was b...

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At the end of the l970s, when Hervé Guibert was just a young man discovering the public interest in photography, he already wanted to be a great writer. His very personal chronicles in the daily newspaper Le Monde were written with remarkable precision. He had already published books, like his first wo...

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Ray was a really great, kind man. I was a part of a little group that included photographers Jamie Morgan and Mark Lebon and singer Neneh Cherry, and we'd all go to him whenever we had a problem-he was like our uncle. As a fashion stylist he was ahead of his time: He brought street style and what he called ...

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I was just a kid when Bill Connors first photographed me for a Glamour magazine cover in the late l960s. We developed a special personal relationship that lasted until his recent death. He took me under his wing and cared for me and loved me as a person; it's important for a young model ...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

I had noted the name Norman Eales on credit lines for over 20 years but never met him. His well-made fashion work appeared in countless magazines-Queen, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and the rest. It was only last September that I learned the details of this photographer's life, at the vernissage...

06.02.2013[ read full story ]

There is no love, no affectedness, not even sensuality in the work of Daniel Boudinet. This secret young man, as handsome as he was sensitive, always kept feelings at a distance, whether they were good or bad. He threw himself into photography in 1968, the year of rupture. From the first he mistrusted...

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Photographers who cover the news are used to doing difficult stories filled with life-and-death struggles, pain and sorrow. But nothing has occurred in recent memory that has been as powerful and as heartbreaking to those reporting from its battlefield as the story of AIDS. No...

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