Matt Leifheit’s recent body of work was inspired by the photographer George Platt Lynes’s love letters and scrapbooks, held at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which had funded Leifheit’s research while he was studying for an MFA from Yale. Platt Lynes had taken his famous photographs of the artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoenig French (the members of the group PaJaMa) in 1941 on Fire Island, where Leifheit had also spent some time. Before the AIDS crisis, it was a place where gay men did not have to hide who they were, and hedonism was given free range. Leifheit’s photographs, taken in 2017, offer a contemporary view of gay life on Fire Island, reminiscent
of the decadence of images from the 1970s by Tom Bianchi and others.
Instead of creating a linear story, Leifheit intends his images to be fragments that, viewed together, create an allusive document of gay life on the island. He chose the locations for his photographs for their historical significance: the Belvedere Hotel, the Grove Hotel, which burned down in 2015 and was rebuilt two years later, and the Ice Palace, a gay disco with its weekly Underwear Party. Pictures taken at night in the Sunken Forest, a rare maritime holly forest on Fire Island, are about cruising and sex – they are surreal and dreamlike. His metaphorical photographs of the sea at night – including the image of two bodies huddled at the shoreline – suggest mortality but also survival.
Although he mixes observed and constructed scenes, land/seascapes and portraits, his pictures all bear the mark of his distinct visual style or, perhaps more accurately, a combination of styles and influences, from the film director Luchino Visconti to the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.
There is something sinister in his portraits, which remind me of the dark, tightly cropped portraits by 19th-century French-born photographer Helmar Lerski. His pictures are flamboyant in their expression of pleasure, gloomy in their sense of foreboding.
Matthew Pillsbury: Nate and Me
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Endia Beal
When photographer Endia Beal was teaching at Winston-Salem State University, one of the historically black colleges and universities, her students regularly talked to her about what they were experiencing in job interviews.
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Liz Johnson Artur
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Matthew Gamber
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Interview: Michelle Dunn Marsh and Sylvia Plachy
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John Jacob
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Catherine Opie: O at LACMA / Catherine Opie: Portraits at the Hammer Museum / Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road at the Museum of Contemporary Art
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Best of 2016
Formed in 1963 by 11 photographers who recognized the necessity of “a forum to address the underrepresentation of African Americans in their field,” the Kamoinge Workshop gave its members a sense of solidarity and support in a period when black Americans were the frequent subject of mainstream media coverage but rarely its author.
The Metaphysical Momentum of Wolfgang Tillmans
A sprawling exhibition at MoMA presents Wolfgang Tillmans’s work as a democratic gesture and a narrative of inclusion.
Matthew Porter: Greet the Dust
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Diane Arbus: In the Beginning at the Met Breuer
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