Bianchi gay
Close your eyes for a second and visualize you are at the party of your dreams. Everyone you love and are infatuated with is around you, the harmony you loved in your teens is playing, and bad trips are not a concept. You move and you love and you spin and you love some more, and then all of your friends die.
I comprehend it’s harsh, but it’s also sort of what happened to Tom Bianchi in the early 1980s, with the onset of AIDS. It’s also the subject of his latest book, Fire Island Pines – Polaroids 1975-1983—a selection of photos taken in a small part of Long Island called the Pines, that functioned as a kind of IRL utopia for a grand community of incredibly attractive and charismatic gay men in the 1970s.
Tom’s name, by the way, is one of those you should know, because he’s been integral in making the world you live in a nicer place than how you found it. You watch Bianchi—who, in the preliminary 70s, also worked as a lawyer in Recent York and Washington, DC—has spent most of his life fighting AIDS and weird heterosexual attitudes toward gay culture. He is the co-founder of a biotech company researching AIDS medication and, if he feels like it, he can also
NOWNESS
For over three decades photographer Tom Bianchi has been capturing the homosexual male experience in America. Best known for his book Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983, a series documenting the male lover community that took sanctuary in the New York enclave—and the hedonistic activities that made it famous—Bianchi’s work abounds with images of tanned and toned nude male forms.
“Bianchi and his peers took to Fire Island as a safe haven from a disapproving world”
But the California-based photographer's life hasn’t always been a year-round holiday. Growing up in Middle America, he and his peers took to Blaze Island as a safe haven from a disapproving earth. At the age of thirty four, having spent ten years practising law, the documentarian tore up his degree and, with a Polaroid camera in hand, embarked on his new life as an artist.
Following the the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, which saw Bianchi lose his partner and many friends, he became active in the clash against the disease, co-founding a biotechnology company and working on the development of Aids medication.
Here, director Barbara Anastacio takes us into
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Featured image is reproduced from Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983, the evergreen book of all gay summertime Polaroid books. I took my camera to the Pines and started making photographs of our life there, Bianchi writes. In those days, many of us with Pines beach houses and jobs in New York felt the need to lie about where wed gotten our tans. I was at the beach on Long Island, gave us about 120 miles of heterosexual beach as cover. The story of the Pines was compelling, but because so many of us lived in the closet, photographs posed a threat. They could be used against us. Jobs could be missing. And worse.
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Chicago Invitational 2019
Tom Bianchi’s recent publication of two books of polaroids taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s provide an intimate chronicle of lgbtq+ sexual and social life just before it would be radically changed by the AIDS crisis. During these equal years, Bianchi was also a flourishing abstract artist of collages and constructions that embraced decorative excess and embedded queer signs. In recent years, Bianchi has returned to his work as a painter-sculptor with artworks that indicate on the on-going AIDS crisis and on the suppressed histories of homoeroticism.
He and art historian David Getsy will discuss how, across this history shadowed by the AIDS crisis, Bianchi has used both abstraction and photography to witness the being of desire and to fight against its invisibility.
Presented with NEW DISCRETIONS, Recent York.
Tom Bianchi’s perform has been shown in galleries and museums internationally for 30 years> Recent shows include Fresh Discretions at Johannes Vogt (New York); Jean Albano Gallery (Chicago); Milwaukee Art Institute; Fahey Klein Gallery (Los Angeles). In 1984, he was given his first solo museum exhibition at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, So