The first extensive exhibition of American photographer David Armstrong (1954-2014) showcases nearly 100 portraits, a selection of landscape images, and around 300 contact prints from the 1970s to early 1990s. The exhibition captures a bygone New York, presenting it as a haven for artists, poets, musicians, and bohemians, including notable figures like Cookie Mueller, John Waters, Nan Goldin, and Vincent Gallo.
Armstrong’s work documents his generation, depicting an attitude to life marked by rebellion, queerness, and punk culture. His portraits convey a deep intimacy and beauty, reflecting a time when being on the fringes was celebrated. Armstrong’s approach, influenced by classical painting, captures the essence of his subjects without diminishing their individuality, focusing on the commonality within a generation.
The exhibition also includes landscape photographs that contrast with the portraits, offering a melancholic and timeless reflection of the AIDS epidemic’s impact. Armstrong’s art is conservative, celebrating beauty and authenticity amidst a backdrop of excess and scarcity. His oeuvre, comprising portraits, blurred landscapes, and commercial fashion photography, marks the end of an era, immortalizing the figure of the outsider with quiet irony and a sense of impending change.
Curated by Daniel Baumann and Wade Guyton, the exhibition provides a comprehensive view of Armstrong’s work, emphasizing his influence and the enduring beauty of his photography. The exhibition runs until September 15, 2024.
David Armstrong / Kunsthalle Zürich. Exhibition walkthrough and interviews with Lisa Love (Trustee of the David Armstrong Estate); Colleen Doyle (Archivist); and Wade Guyton (Artist and Curator). Zürich (Switzerland), June 7, 2024.
Armstrong’s work documents his generation, depicting an attitude to life marked by rebellion, queerness, and punk culture. His portraits convey a deep intimacy and beauty, reflecting a time when being on the fringes was celebrated. Armstrong’s approach, influenced by classical painting, captures the essence of his subjects without diminishing their individuality, focusing on the commonality within a generation.
The exhibition also includes landscape photographs that contrast with the portraits, offering a melancholic and timeless reflection of the AIDS epidemic’s impact. Armstrong’s art is conservative, celebrating beauty and authenticity amidst a backdrop of excess and scarcity. His oeuvre, comprising portraits, blurred landscapes, and commercial fashion photography, marks the end of an era, immortalizing the figure of the outsider with quiet irony and a sense of impending change.
Curated by Daniel Baumann and Wade Guyton, the exhibition provides a comprehensive view of Armstrong’s work, emphasizing his influence and the enduring beauty of his photography. The exhibition runs until September 15, 2024.
David Armstrong / Kunsthalle Zürich. Exhibition walkthrough and interviews with Lisa Love (Trustee of the David Armstrong Estate); Colleen Doyle (Archivist); and Wade Guyton (Artist and Curator). Zürich (Switzerland), June 7, 2024.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00So, this is
00:29the largest exhibition of David Armstrong's work ever and the first in an institution.
00:37And it came about because David was a friend of mine and yours and he passed away 10 years ago
00:45and all of his work was left in a barn and kind of unceremoniously stored and
00:53in terrible condition in Massachusetts. And so we brought everything to my studio
00:57to try to stabilize things, figure out what existed, and organize them. And in the end
01:04we discovered hundreds of photos, hundreds of contact sheets, negatives, many that had never
01:11been published or exhibited. So this is the first, I hope, of many exhibitions kind of
01:18reintroducing David's work in the world. And the scope is early 70s from when he was a student
01:27in Boston to I think we're around mid-90s and almost all black and white. There's a series
01:35of color photos that are on two screens from slides that he took in the late 70s early 80s.
01:57Well, I'm part of the early period of time with David because I went to the Boston Museum School
02:05with him and that's where we met in 75. And this was the period where he took most of the pictures
02:14in the show are in the 70s. When he and the Boston School, there were five or six of photographers
02:23who were really relevant at that time and definitely wild and lived kind of underground
02:32and spent a lot of time traveling with them and seeing them take these pictures that you see here.
02:39So a lot of the faces are familiar, but David was pretty much my memory of everything in those days.
02:47So we would have discussions and suddenly he would be bringing up somebody. So a lot of these
02:54pictures I saw him in the studio printing at the Boston Museum School. There was a great dark room
03:00downstairs and it was kind of the invention of color photography, which we don't have in this
03:06show except for in the slides. But it was a very raw and kind of active photo department at the
03:14museum school. And so and then we stayed friends for ever until he died. And luckily Wade and the
03:24studio took over archiving this work because it would be quite a feat to do on my own.
03:45The interesting thing I think about the show too is because we believe David printed almost all of
04:05these photos himself. Early later he preferred to work with a dark room and someone to print
04:11the photos with him. But his hands were on all of these and we decided to treat them as
04:19as objects, historical objects, and not frame them in a way that concealed the history of the
04:26of the paper, how they were handled or mishandled. Very mishandled. And so it's also
04:34interesting to see, I think right now in relation to photography, just seeing the materiality of
04:41of the the print itself. And I think that will be a revelation for people. And I was shocked at how
04:50many people David knew and were in his life because all of this is long before I met him in the 90s.
04:57And there is, you know, I imagine these were like troubled times. There was a lot of drug use,
05:05a lot of people were dying of AIDS. It wasn't the easiest of times and yet he
05:10seemed to take incredibly beautiful photos of everyone and being calm. And he didn't take the
05:19angst and put them in the photo. So I found that remarkable too. It's also amazing to see what
05:26they've done in the archives because I know most of these photographs I can recognize.
05:31But then there was so much new, so many new pictures that I'd never seen. Obviously the
05:37contact sheets are just phenomenal that they found. And so it's such a revelation to revisit
05:45these moments and see them here. It's magical, makes some of us cry, but incredibly
05:56an amazing effort from the archives. Speaking of the contact sheets, a couple images kind of
06:02popped out at me and maybe you can zoom in later. But there are moments where you see, I mean you
06:08see like the image that he selected, but then also kind of the film around it in the life in
06:16motion. As well as there are some great ones where you can see him taking a photo of his friend,
06:23like George Stoll. And then the camera gets handed, he hands George the camera obviously,
06:31and there are all these pictures of David. And it's kind of shocking to see him appear
06:37in his own contact sheets. All the cameras in those periods of time in that group of people
06:43were held together by electrical tape. They were falling apart, they held flashes up here to take
06:50your picture. I mean maybe it seems like maybe they do that still, but then it was how they
06:57took pictures with broken cameras. Here they are.
07:27So it all started about nine years ago when Wade asked me if I could help him
07:34organize his friend's estate. David had passed away a year prior in 2014 and
07:42everyone was trying to figure out what to do with the holdings. So we, I got in a van and
07:50went up to his property in the Berkshires and we collected everything there and brought it back to
07:56Wade's studio in Brooklyn and just started to look at all of the materials. We were using a
08:04small office where we had boxes piled up and it was like a maze through the walls of the storage
08:12bins that he had, all these plastic storage bins. Everything was thrown together in a pile so you
08:19had negatives and film that weren't labeled or numbered in any way together with other objects
08:27of other belongings of his. And sometimes we had, we found other surprises in the materials as well.
08:36Since it was stored in a barn there would be an occasion where we had come across
08:40a nest or chestnuts that had been chewed and that was, we had to pull everything out of the
08:50the boxes and try and make sense of everything. We also had to try to figure out a framework of
08:56organization and that actually happened in several different passes over time.
09:02And we relied heavily on the people around David that knew him and cared for his work and his
09:09legacy and wanted to help us organize everything. So we ended up inviting as many people as we could
09:16think of who knew him, who might know something about this time and know who the people in the
09:21images are. And over the last nine years, still up into weeks before we hung this show, we've been
09:29reaching out to the people who remain living today who are part of David's community to help identify
09:36all of the people in the images. So that's been to me one of the most enjoyable parts of the process
09:45is tapping into this constellation of artists and musicians and poets that, and just friends
09:53around David who were who were alive at the time and have these amazing stories about him
10:01and about each other. So and one of the tools actually that we used to get information, it was
10:10kind of a surprise to us at some point when we decided that we wanted to let people know
10:17that there was a process underway just so that the larger community around David could trust
10:23that we were taking care of it. We started an Instagram account just to show what we were
10:28archiving and as we started posting images, we started learning about the people in the images
10:36we were sharing. People just in an open source way we were collecting data and sometimes we were
10:44actually would post an image and say this person is unidentified and then suddenly somebody would
10:51pipe up in the comments and say well that's me. And so we were able to find a lot of people
10:57and give titles to the images that way. And our direct message in that account is full of
11:05amazing stories about that time and about the context of the photograph that was taken.
11:36We started the effort nine years ago and the more that I work with and learn about other
11:56artists archives, the more I realize that that is just the time that it sometimes takes. With a
12:02photography archive especially, I believe the rough estimate is around 250,000
12:11negatives that we hold apart from other objects and put into an order and stabilized
12:20in the archive. And then the contact sheets themselves, we have tens of thousands of them
12:27that correspond with the negatives and the printed images close to 10,000. So it was a
12:35huge undertaking but yeah we did piece together a lot of help. One thing I think I always think
12:42is important about my the thing that's enabled me to work here for so long is I think it's a
12:51very unique situation. David knew exactly who to ask to help take care of his estate and his legacy.
13:00He asked his friends to be the executors of his estate and he asked Wade to curate the show,
13:07his first posthumous exhibition. And I think it's rare that you have a situation where
13:15people are so ready and willing to pull resources toward an effort like this.
13:24And it allowed us to take the time that it needed, the nine years that it actually
13:32we actually required to get to this point. And I think a lot of other estates and archives are
13:38cobbling together a process one grant at a time and we found ourselves actually just able to
13:47continue moving forward with each phase of this process. So I would say that Wade had no idea
13:55what it meant. None of us knew what it meant when we said okay well let's just get together
14:01everything together under one roof and start to look through it and see what is involved. Nobody
14:07had any idea that we'd be standing here 10 years later, 20 years later and actually having a show.
14:37So
15:08maybe I can talk a little bit about what you don't see here and what is a part of a larger archive.
15:13But one of the most maybe moving processes for me was actually going through, we have years and years
15:23of correspondence, letters that came to David from his loved ones that he saved. And one of the
15:32things that is apparent as you read through all of the letters is how everybody who knew and loved
15:41David and wrote to him had this sense that their relationship with David was the most special.
15:50And I think we hear from people who knew him then that he had a way of making you feel
15:56like you were the most important person in the room, the most important person in the world.
16:01And I think that that's really, yeah that's something that's always amazed me
16:09as we've talked to people and pulled together oral histories about that time. As we've read
16:14through the letters that we've read to David, just these gushing love letters asking are you
16:19thinking about me. We don't have any of the letters that he wrote back or even know if he did write
16:25back, but it's amazing to see the way that people expressed love to him. Another thing I think that's
16:33really amazing is that we hear all the time, and I witnessed when I went to David's home,
16:40I witnessed how he maybe wasn't so precious about the way that he kept his belongings.
16:45And that was certainly true for the way that he kept his photography holdings as well.
16:51But I think it's amazing that he seemed to have kept everything nonetheless.
16:58He wasn't precious about any one given object, but he still maintained, he still managed to hold
17:05on to everything. And so I think it's actually quite remarkable that, for instance, that we have
17:13all of the contact sheets that we do dating back to 1972, and that we also have the negatives.
17:22It took a long time to find a match to a match to a match, a negative to a contact sheet to a print,
17:27but we did. And so I think that that's, it's incredible that all of the places he moved to
17:35throughout his young life and the places he settled in his older age, that he was able to
17:40hang on to everything. It's kind of amazing.