In 2009, the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles revealed the world of David Armstrong to the Arles public in an exhibition organized at the Parc des Ateliers, curated by Nan Goldin, then guest artistic director.
Fifteen years later, his work returns to Arles in this new exhibition presented by LUMA Arles. More than just a portraitist, Armstrong, who died in 2014, captured the essence of a generation and a certain attitude to life, which he immortalized in a series of images as intimate as they were striking. From the outset, Armstrong set out to photograph his era and those closest to him.
In the 1970s, he studied photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He joined a larger group of avant-garde artists, including Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Gail Thacker, Mark Morrisroe, Tabboo! and Jack Pierson, known as the Boston School. His early black-and-white photographs portray a youth both introspective and rebellious, embodying a fragile, magnetic form of freedom. His work is a veritable document of the times, an archive that exudes the beauty of a New York that no longer exists. A New York as attitude, beyond the Empire State Building, postcards and countless film scenes shot in its frenetic streets or giant billboards. His New York is a promise, a haven for the disenfranchised, for artists, poets, musicians and bohemians of all kinds. The exhibition shows how, from the outset, Armstrong did not simply depict people, but a posture in the face of life and its setbacks – an attitude intoxicated and exuberant, disenchanted and idle. These portraits are still striking today for their frankness: no filter, no lie. These men and women confronted the lens with a seductive, free eye.
These vaporous landscapes form a counterpoint to the portraits, becoming far more timeless. Armstrong immortalizes the places he wanders through life, the panoramas he seems to capture on the sly. He made them in the late 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. They must be seen through the prism of this immense drama: they are memento mori. These works remind us of the transience of existence.
With this major exhibition, LUMA Arles once again celebrates David Armstrong’s singular gaze, his melancholy aesthetic, and his lasting influence on contemporary photography. An immersion in the work of an artist who, far beyond portraiture, was able to translate an era and a state of mind onto glossy paper.
