Art review: Anthony Friedkin at drkrm.gallery
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The landmark 2005 movie “Brokeback Mountain” is conventionally regarded as a romantic gay love story instead of what it really is — a heartbreaking tragedy about the closet. Rarely does society want to admit its complicity in repression.
But 40 years ago, the Stonewall Rebellion marked a sudden beginning of the protracted end of secrecy shrouding homosexuality in American life, which the closet still represents.
The anniversary of the ruckus is being remembered in a compelling show of vintage photographs by Anthony Friedkin at drkrm.gallery. (A selection was last shown in 1994 at Stephen Cohen Gallery, which collaborated on this exhibition.) Collectively, the 56 prints in “Gay, A Photographic Essay 1969-1972” don’t just refuse to participate in maintaining silence; they also actively embrace taking part in the diversity of gay experience that publicly emerged in Stonewall’s wake.
Men, women, transsexuals, drag queens, people of different ethnicities, teenagers, seniors, street hustlers, churchmen, social workers, social activists, lovers, partygoers, parade marchers, parade watchers — there’s nothing monolithic about the subject under review in these photographs. Friedkin’s visual essay emerges as a landmark in taking the hinges off the closet door.
The photographer was barely 20 when he began the series, which records aspects of gay life in Los Angeles (with side trips to San Francisco). In the gallery, the visual essay is introduced by a framed copy of an audacious 1973 letter the young artist wrote to the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, when the project was complete.
There’s no indication of whether Szarkowski, the most powerful institutional figure in photography at the time, replied. But the letter is wonderfully pushy. Every time the word “gay” appears in Friedkin’s text, it is typed in capital letters, as if to underscore that silence and invisibility are being challenged by the photographs offered for exhibition.
Some pictures have the nonchalance of street photography — couples embracing in public, laughing among themselves, gathering on the front stoop, going about their daily business. Others radiate the documentary insights of powerful photojournalism.
In one of the most mesmerizing photographs, two Hollywood street hustlers display a forced casualness and studied masculinity as they scan the street in opposite directions. They look away from each other, but the mirror image of their poses subtly binds the men together.
The Rev. Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, stands inside the charred ruin of a burned-down sanctuary. Streaming daylight virtually obliterates much of the stained-glass window behind him, while the whiteness of the sun’s illumination stands in sharp contrast to the dark fury and sorrow that mingle on the pastor’s face.
Divine, the cross-dressing actor made famous in John Waters’ early movies, relaxes in his dressing room at a San Francisco theater, a wide grin lighting up his face. Neither his hugely padded brassiere, the rolls of fat on his exposed torso, nor the post-Bozo-the-Clown eye makeup flanked by glittery drop-earrings speaks of anything but a highly individualized, fantastically inventive and thoroughly secure self-image.
Framing the portrait with an informal intimacy, Friedkin shot Divine as the star of his own life. The artistic performances of subject and photographer are infectious, and they are replayed throughout the show in pictures of people whose names will never be known.
-- Christopher Knight
drkrm.gallery, 2121 San Fernando Road, Glassell Park, (323) 223-6867, through Aug. 2. Closed Mondays.
Top: ‘Two Hustlers, Selma Ave., Hollywood, 1971’; bottom: ‘Women at Gay Liberation Parade, Hollywood, Calif., 1972.’ Credit: Anthony Friedkin / drkrm.gallery
