David Armstrong on 40 Years of Photographing Beautiful Men
Photo: Courtesy of David Armstrong
“People generally think of me as irrelevant because I deal in things that have never been fashionable,” says celebrated fine-art photographer David Armstrong while smoking a Newport 100 in his 615 Brooklyn brownstone, where he shoots most of his work right now. “If anything, this [fashion] work has allowed me to [do] something that’s contemporary.”
Armstrong was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and spent many years photo-editing for his close friend Nan Goldin. Best known for his intimate portraits of men (whether they be friends, lovers, or something in between), which he’s been shooting for nearly 40 years, Armstrong’s photos have greatly influenced young, gay male photographers, from Ryan McGinley to Alasdair McLellan. But not exclusively.
In recent years, he has been commissioned by Carine Roitfeld, Hedi Slimane, and Cecilia Dean for commercial fashion projects. This year, Armstrong contributed to CR Fashion Book, 10 Magazine, and AnOther Man, while also continuing his personal portraiture work focused on young men “in the bloom of youth,” a period he says lasts about six months.
Whether Armstrong, 58, shoots for his clients or for himself, he says, “In all the portraits, there’s a lot of sexual sublimation.” He takes a drag of his cigarette and continues, “Photographing is like a seduction; it’s intimate when you’re alone with them.” Yet he’s quick to point out: “I never want to manipulate anybody but just put [them] in a comfortable place and then see what comes out.” To see what he means, we asked Armstrong to choose his most pivotal male portraits from his nearly four-decade career and then had him break down his thought process for each image, which you can read in the slideshow ahead.
Bruce, Cambridge, 1974 "[This represents my] first year of art school. I had known Nan [Goldin] since we were 14, so I knew a lot...
Bruce, Cambridge, 1974 "[This represents my] first year of art school. I had known Nan [Goldin] since we were 14, so I knew a lot about looking at pictures and how they were made. When I first bought a camera, I had what I knew from Nan’s; It was a wide-angle lens Canon.”
“This was my boyfriend, Bruce. He had this demonic aspect to him. You would think the way everything turned out it was almost plotted by him. With drugs it was very scary because he became a full-on junkie. So much of the Boston School has to do with Bruce. Bruce had so much to do with all of us, and his Polaroids were as good, or better, than anyone’s — at least more genuine."
Photo: David Armstrong
Marc, Cambridge, 1976 "I decided to get into more formal portraiture. I started using a tripod, I got a twin-lens reflex camera, and it was ...
Marc, Cambridge, 1976 "I decided to get into more formal portraiture. I started using a tripod, I got a twin-lens reflex camera, and it was always a portrait sitting. [This] was toward finishing my second year of art school and I was putting together a style that was a pastiche of people: Julia Margaret Cameron to Irving Penn to Diane Arbus. Really disparate, but it was about [creating] a portrait that was quiet; it was really about the emotional content. That was probably was one of the first successful ones. I would do five rolls for that one image, and I would pour over them for months, and everyone would say, ‘I don’t see how you can even tell the difference, they all look the same; they’re all great.’ This is Marc. There’s nothing happening before or after. It’s not about a narrative. It’s just him."
Photo: David Armstrong
Kevin, New York City, 1977 "This is the first great picture I took in New York. It was taken in the first month I was here and it’s of my [t...
Kevin, New York City, 1977 "This is the first great picture I took in New York. It was taken in the first month I was here and it’s of my [then] boyfriend, Kevin. I met him at the Anvil in the backroom; we had sex before we even talked. We were hanging out outside, it was just dawn, there were a bunch of people outside, and I just thought, ‘This kid is just so fucking beautiful. I love him.’ And he said, ‘Do you wanna go home?’ And so we went.”
“He lived on Saint Luke's Place, which, you know, is quite fancy; he was ‘kept’ by this really rich editor, Jim, who had a harem there with three boys in a townhouse on Saint Luke’s place that was owned by Robert De Niro’s father. I was intrigued by Kevin, and he was also a call boy, which for some reason I found incredibly sexy. I was just madly in love with him and it was super romantic. He was 19 then and I was 23; he was a Midwestern boy, the way only they can be, so simple and so sweet. Yet, for various ghastly reasons, I ended up breaking up with him three years later. He’s the only boyfriend I had broken up with, rather than the other way around, and the only one I should have stayed with.”
Photo: David Armstrong
Chris, New York City, 1979 "I said, 'You just wear what you feel comfortable in' and this is what he wore. It's a very mannered portrait. It...
Chris, New York City, 1979 "I said, 'You just wear what you feel comfortable in' and this is what he wore. It's a very mannered portrait. It works terrifically, I think. This was [photographed] at my apartment, using a super-wide lens. It's the mega opposite of something candid; it's a real portrait sitting.”
“Ninety percent is about who it's of. And secondly, the whole thing is to make the person as comfortable as humanly possible or nothing is going to happen, nothing is going to be revealed to you. And these people, the difference [from my fashion pictures is that] I knew them already. What happens later with my fashion pictures is that it turns into this … the dynamic changes so much because you're much older than the subject."
Photo: David Armstrong
Rene, New York City, 1979 "This is Rene Ricard at his apartment on 12th Street. He’s one of the only surviving people from the Factory. He's...
Rene, New York City, 1979 "This is Rene Ricard at his apartment on 12th Street. He’s one of the only surviving people from the Factory. He's really notorious, really smart, but very difficult … very much a diva.”
“I would think of this as a fancy portrait. If you line up [all my photographs, this] would stand out; it’s more adventurous. He’s not sitting or standing, it's a longer shot on the body, past the knees. Even stuff like [points at the box in the upper background] I wouldn’t have liked in my pictures at the time. There’s also his boyfriend [Louie Chaban] who was sitting out of focus in the background. There’s also the thing that it's not of a ‘beautiful’ boy.”
Photo: David Armstrong
French Chris, Paris, 1980 "I was in Paris for six months and this is the only good picture I had done during all that time. I had bought a P...
French Chris, Paris, 1980 "I was in Paris for six months and this is the only good picture I had done during all that time. I had bought a Pentax 67 so this shows the jump from square format to ideal format. I really used this continuously from then. The Whitney bought this.”
“We had this flat that [Chris's] father had just inherited from his sister in Pigalle, and we went to his parents every Sunday for dinner and would stay over 'til Monday. You can't see it here, but there's a prison tattoo [on Chris's arm] reading 'maman.' Monday mornings he would get into bed with his mother, which I thought was so bizarre. Another thing, on Sunday nights, we would all take baths, but all with the same bath water."
Photo: David Armstrong
Steven, Cambridge, 1984 "This is square [format] again, but this [was taken] later. I left New York in 1984 because I was so strung out and ...
Steven, Cambridge, 1984 "This is square [format] again, but this [was taken] later. I left New York in 1984 because I was so strung out and it was the end of the road of that phase of my New York life. I was staying with my friend Louis and this kid, Steven, and his fiancé, Tracy. Steven was so hot and I was having a thing with him. It was a tiny apartment; I'd be fucking him in one room, while Tracy was in another.”
“I don't think, until now, we had seen a profile. This [was shot] outside on the porch, but the thing behind him was one of those blue plastic tarps. I just really loved the idea of the darkness being etched out against the light, and the fact that he was looking toward the dark. Again, this is an ongoing thing, but he really had, the same way I [do], a very self-destructive side to him.”
Photo: David Armstrong
Thomas, New York City, 1990 "This is when I came back to New York. There's really nothing in between that period; I had stopped taking pictu...
Thomas, New York City, 1990 "This is when I came back to New York. There's really nothing in between that period; I had stopped taking pictures during those five years. The choice I thought I was facing at that point was: Do you want a life or do you want to take photographs? A life was much better so I just stopped. The reason I did start photo again was that Nan came up to Boston in 1988 for the same reason I had, and she just thought it was essential I start again. [She would say,] 'Look for something you've never seen,' and she was right.”
“This was taken right when I got back to New York. This boy Thomas was just incredibly beautiful. He was Italian and 19. Like the Rene portrait, it wasn't an upright formal portrait, I really wanted this kind of suggestion of something sexual, at least an indication that [he] was something I wanted."
Photo: David Armstrong
Steven, New York City, 1990 "This falls in the same category as the Rene portrait in that it's more contextual; it's in his apartment and [h...
Steven, New York City, 1990 "This falls in the same category as the Rene portrait in that it's more contextual; it's in his apartment and [he's surrounded] by all his stuff. It's a semi-nude, but it's not like Steven's no major sex bomb. He was acting out all the great divas of opera and it really felt like he had calmed down for one second for this one roll of film.”
“I like this a lot, it's more complicated than the others, but I really like the shadow on the wall and all the extraneous stuff, and that it can actually work. I feel like now, the further away I can get [from the subject], the more successful it is. Because that's what's really difficult for me. The tighter [the photograph] is, the easier it is in every way; there's almost this forced intimacy because you're that close to that person and they're looking at you."
Photo: David Armstrong
Jose Marie and Scott, Berlin, 1993 "I love Berlin. I went for a week and stayed for three years. My big project in coming to Berlin were lan...
Jose Marie and Scott, Berlin, 1993 "I love Berlin. I went for a week and stayed for three years. My big project in coming to Berlin were landscapes. Primarily, but I started to really get into the idea of shallow-focus portraits where [the subjects] are in focus, but everything else gets blurred out.”
“This started in New York, but there's a lot of shallow-focus portraits where the background gets to be kind of important [in my work]. I really wanted to loosen up the idea of what it would be look like without [the subject]. And then, I started going out in Berlin with a 35mm and shooting in a style I never had before; doing these soft-focus landscapes of these places. For me, it was an exercise to see if I could do something other than a portrait."
Photo: David Armstrong
Jason, New York City, 1998 "Okay, so, it's 1997 and I had just taken an apartment across the street before I bought this house, and one nigh...
Jason, New York City, 1998 "Okay, so, it's 1997 and I had just taken an apartment across the street before I bought this house, and one night I went out with a friend of mine, who lived in midtown, to this hustler bar, Stella's. It was mostly black and Latino boys, but they had these strip contests — and so we went there. I fixated on this one Puerto Rican boy and I couldn't even talk to him; he was so beautiful. I started going every Friday and Saturday night just with the intention of talking to him. I had calling cards made from Tiffany's I was going to give him. After three or four months, he would knock me on my shoulder and go, 'Aren't you going to say hello?' But I couldn't, and he also had a John; some guy that kept him. I'm sure this still exists, but it was much more visible then.”
“Meanwhile, I thought it would be really great to do a set of portraits of these guys. And so, I asked one to meet me at this short-stay hotel across the street to do some pictures and I paid him his rate. I'm doing a book of these images now."
Photo: David Armstrong
Francis, Paris, 2001 "I'd just moved into [this] house and Hedi [Slimane]'s personal assistant called asking if I'd want to do his portrait;...
Francis, Paris, 2001 "I'd just moved into [this] house and Hedi [Slimane]'s personal assistant called asking if I'd want to do his portrait; I really didn't know who he was, so I asked, "Who is he?" This was about the time he took over Dior [Homme]. [I ended-up having him] come over on a Sunday, and we did a really beautiful portrait, actually. We spent most of the day together. He liked the portrait and it was published for Vogue Paris. Later, he contacted me asking if I'd like to come [to Paris] the week leading up to [runway] show. All the [male models] were in town for the show, and he said, "You can have anyone you want," and that's when I saw Francis.”
“I took pictures of maybe 40 boys there, it wasn't just Francis. [Hedi's] atelier was very chic, modern, with beautiful light. He really was just the nicest person, ever. He's just crazy — like Andy Warhol, mediating every little thing. He would photograph with a digital camera, an analog 67 camera, and a video camera; every look, every boy. He gave us a driver. Whatever we wanted, we had. Everyone was extremely nice."
Photo: David Armstrong
Enrique, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2003 "By this point already, I was really over [fashion]; I thought I really had to pull [my fashion work] back...
Enrique, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2003 "By this point already, I was really over [fashion]; I thought I really had to pull [my fashion work] back. I would just see these boys and think, ‘I don’t want anyone ... I don’t want a stylist.’ I worked for 25 years without one; these kids, they don’t need any hair, they don’t need any makeup. I can do it, just put the clothes here. Anyone that knows me well enough in that world knows that’s the best way to do it; the best pictures you’re going to get.”
“When you’re taking someone’s portrait, you get to talk to them, and you have a little bit of understanding of who they are. That obviously affects the way you’re taking the picture. This one seems very stylish, but very sinister at the same time. It has these kind of suggestions where he’s either going to give you a blow job or he’s some kind of trained seal. Both his parents were deaf, but he wasn’t, which I thought was amazing."
Photo: David Armstrong
Chris, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2004 "There was a point in which I realized eye contact is a device I rely on heavily. After a while, there's [on...
Chris, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2004 "There was a point in which I realized eye contact is a device I rely on heavily. After a while, there's [only] so many confrontational portraits you can do. I started getting this idea, like boys looking towards windows or doors, and I got this idea in my mind that together they felt like some demented whore house where these boys were dressed up in these costumes. I really liked the fact that it worked so well without any kind of eye contact; that you really were just seeing someone. It was starting to tell some kind of story.”
Photo: David Armstrong
Anthony, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2006 "Divine. I love that his face in shadow. I just love how the whole thing is working formally, and it still...
Anthony, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2006 "Divine. I love that his face in shadow. I just love how the whole thing is working formally, and it still has content in terms of emotion. I like how [his body] appears to be illuminated, but it’s as though he’s in a ring of shadow.”
“Sometimes I have to think, what is really important about this piece of clothing? The way some of the stylists work today is just so simple-minded; they just want to pile on endless credits. Maybe they have to, but I don’t have to be a part of it. I’d rather be homeless. I just can’t do that. I’ve always said, ‘Just put an inset in that shows all that stuff because there’s no way you’re going to make good photographs.’ The thing I hate the most is when they say, ‘We really want the best picture,’ and, you know, they don’t. There’s too many credits. A really good stylist won’t try and do this."
Photo: David Armstrong
Boyd, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2009 "I think people would generally think [this] was set-up, but it’s notl. It was story of Rodarte for Luis Vene...
Boyd, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2009 "I think people would generally think [this] was set-up, but it’s notl. It was story of Rodarte for Luis Venegas’s Candy magazine, but [Luis] had given me three months to do it, and they just sent over a bunch of dresses and I did it that way. Boyd was living here then and [I said] ‘Just try on one of these dresses,’ but he wasn’t really into the idea at first. Well, he said, ‘Just give me a Klonopin and I’ll do anything.’ So he took it and he started modeling a bit in the bed back there [in the room] and then he just literally passed out, but he said, ‘I should pull my pants down and put these panties on instead,’ before he did. I said, 'Great,' and I think I took two 8GB chips of this. He didn’t wake up for 24 hours, and those dresses, I don’t think you’ve tried them on, but putting them on takes three hours. I kept thinking he was going to rip through the holes, and [there was just] one sample.”
“That’s my foot. When I was looking [at the photograph] later, it really looks like a police photo where they find this dead body. With Boyd and I, it’s very different because we got very close through our years of working together [for my 615 Jefferson Avenue book]."
Photo: David Armstrong
Jake, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2012 “I'm not thinking of it when I'm doing it, but somehow the light always ends up in some really androgynous zone; a...
Jake, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 2012 “I'm not thinking of it when I'm doing it, but somehow the light always ends up in some really androgynous zone; a nipple, shoulder, or the curve of the neck. It's a subconscious thing. [There's] this very particular time of a boy's youth; it's very short. It's that time when someone's in the bloom of youth, the skin. Anywhere between 16 to 23. There's still a lot of flexibility and fun in them, and they haven't nailed down what the world is to them. The idea of youth before you have your first heartbreak … for me, what's implicit in that is all this decay that goes on just before you die. It's very short, very ephemeral, it doesn't last long. You can see a boy six months later and it's gone. It's like when a girl has had sex, she's been plucked. It takes a woman to know it."
Photo: David Armstrong
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