KINGSTON, N.Y. — The June exhibition at the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s new home in Kingston celebrates Pride Month with iconic images of the LGBTQ+ community taken by Fred W. McDarrah.
“This exhibition represents a view of queer cultural life and the LGBTQ rights movement in New York City, from the period before the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, continuing through activist protests around the AIDS crisis in the 1980s,” the Center, at 474 Broadway in Kingston says on its website.
One photo featured in the exhibition from June 29, 1975, shows two mothers marching at the Sixth Annual Gay Liberation Day March in New York City carrying signs that were revolutionary at the time. One read, “I love my gay son!” and the other, “I will not be a Closet Mother.” That and many other images in the exhibition document the start of movements like PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and ACT UP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
Readers who remember the Village Voice in the late 1960s or who followed the gay rights movement through the decades might recognize one particular image in the show, Vince Aletti, who curated the exhibit, said in a phone interview. “The most famous picture of Stonewall that he took the day after that riot of a number of gay men and women standing on a stoop right next to the Stonewall Inn — a number of people who were involved in the rebellion there. … It’s the most reproduced picture of that moment. … and has become a kind of historic image.”
The show includes a portrait of Larry Kramer, who founded ACT UP in 1987. It also features portraits of renowned poets Frank O’Hara and W.H. Auden, and pictures of protests, marches and key figures in the gay rights movement “in all its contentious and celebratory public display,” the site says.
Also featured are portraits of James Baldwin, John Cage, Jackie Curtis, Allen Ginsberg, Jewell Gomez, Christopher Isherwood, Jed Johnson, Jill Johnson, Marsha P. Johnson, Charles Ludlum, Joan Nestle, Frank O’Hara, Susan Sontag, Larry Rivers, James Slattery (aka Candy Darling), Tennessee Williams, Andy Warhol and others.
These shots and most others in the exhibition were all published in The Village Voice. McDarrah, who died in 2007 at the age of 81, was the first picture editor and staff photographer for the alternative weekly newspaper and worked there until he died.
Coinciding with the advent of LGBTQ+ Pride month, Pride and Protest is curated by Aletti, a photography critic and author, from the Fred W. McDarrah Archive held by MUUS Collection. Aletti said the work was first presented by the MUUS Collection at Paris Photo in November 2023. After it leaves Kingston, McDarrah’s work will travel to the New York Historical Society where an exhibition is planned for January 2025.
“It looked great in Paris and I’m hoping it looks equally good at the Woodstock space,” Aletti said.
The exhibition is accompanied by a newsprint publication with a text by Aletti.
“By the time I met Fred W. McDarrah in the mid-1980s, he was already a well-established New York character: blustery, opinionated, entertaining, loud — sometimes brusque but never mean-spirited,” Aletti wrote in the show catalog.
Aletti, 78, said that McDarrah was “one of the very few survivors of the original Village Voice (founded in 1955), first as the only staff photographer, later as the photo editor.”
He said McDarrah was “legendary, but far from ready to fade into history. He clearly loved the pressure and excitement of getting out a weekly paper, kibbitzing with the photo editors who succeeded him, delivering just the right vintage print from his archives.”
Aletti said he worked with McDarrah at the Voice and that he was “a great character and one of sort of the backbones of the paper.”
Aletti said that as an editor at the paper, he often looked for reasons to reprint McDarrah’s photos “of Beat and bohemian Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ‘60s.”
The exhibition’s “focus is Fred McDarrah’s work with all sorts of gay-related material, mostly the largest part of the group are images of demonstrations and parades that he did over the years, starting with pretty much the first parade after Stonewall. They’re very busy pictures. There’s lots of people in them, there’s people and banners … I decided to do that as a strip through the center of the space at, sort of, eye level. You really need to be able to spend some time with them,” Aletti said.
The show opened Saturday and will be on exhibit through Sept. 1. The gallery, at 474 Broadway in Kingston, is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays.
