The Brooklyn Rail

From its early pictorialist tendencies—some a characteristic of nineteenth century optics—photography’s history of romanticism has parallelled its reputation for seeking fact. Photographic romanticism is a familiar visual lexicon of sensitivity: of soft, lambent surface and graceful form; of classical accomplishment and deep feeling that inevitably gazes backward to an idealized and charming past. It is a sensibility with clear correspondence in literature and film. As an affirmation of the medium’s subjectivity and sentience, romanticism has also been, at times, a strategy to cleave the photograph from its stubborn descriptive functions, its attachment (and service) to the literal. The narrative of romanticism tends toward metaphor. It is a visual style that dissolves.

Curated by Kelly Taxter and Jay Sanders, the prism of romanticism pervades the lavish David Armstrong: Portraits, the first institutional retrospective of the late photographer since his death twelve years ago. For a body of work that has often seemed eclipsed by more clamorous endeavors, this exhibition sets up an opportunity for Armstrong’s portraiture to find their place, and here, the portrait crossing genres into landscape and object, And the theatrics of the installation is deftly calibrated to evoke the artist’s, at times, brooding sensibility.

The exhibition divides into two rooms, a row of nine landscape pictures as a fulcrum between the two. They establish the cultivated pastoral as a pervasive sensibility; an awareness of the domestic and its staged exterior surrounding. These vertical landscapes with thick black borders suggest windows and gazing from a darkened room (like a camera) to the flickers of wavering and lambent light outside. The blurry landscapes establish the exterior as a place where topiaries might echo the arc of a torso, where floral detail drapes figurative sculpture (Vienna, Charlottenburg, Versailles) in Edenic confidence.

Three long vitrines share pictures and scrap books in the South Gallery. It is the nature of the vitrine to imbue what it contains with historical significance, here transforming pictures into elegiac objects, and objects into containers of melancholic value. With pictures lain in place, the vitrines maintain the mood of recumbency in the portraiture. One vitrine contains work from the Arles exhibition The Indecisive Moment (2009), situating the prints as historical scrap, their creases and worn surface evoking the patina of the hand, a murmur of their artisanal nature.

A fourth vitrine is positioned at a set of windows with floor length diaphanous curtains obscuring White Street and forming a sort of porch-like area, separated from the other galleries. Inside, five photo albums lay open, poised. They are antique volumes with Armstrong’s small pictures tipped in (one with fraying medical tape) to the black or yellowed newsprint, carefully recreating an appearance of remnant and objet trouve. The anecdotal scrapbook becomes enigmatic; they appear as volumes for scholarly rumination.

Scattered throughout the show are portraits that were commissioned by men’s fashion journals, yet uncompromised by any mercantile agenda. Like the work of Deborah Turbeville or Sarah Moon, Armstrong offered a tactile intimacy; a sense of fashion as a history that is felt. And at the time, his work allowed access to the male figure in a soft eroticism that was unthreatening, an antidote to, say, the muscular tumble of Bruce Weber.

The mood of elegy shifts somewhat in the North Gallery where a horizontal cluster of pictures spans a grey wall. An installation reassembled from a 2004 exhibition from Matthew Marks Gallery, “Your Picture on My Wall” is a constellation of photographs—a few of landscape, some of interiors, most of male portraits—made between 1977 and 2023, a casting call that anthologizes the bodies of work in somewhat less ghostly, more concrete terms.

Intuitively, we photograph what we like; what engenders our approval. Armstrong had a curatorial instinct, and his photographic activity seems an extension of that connoisseurship; a deeply felt and consummate identification with grace and style and high cultural history. In a body of work that has been frequently described as intimate, it would be a challenge to understand these portraits as of individuals. Embalmed as they are in the amber of youth and beauty and desire, they exist as talismans of longing, however general.

In his obituary in the New York Times, David Armstrong is described as “a photographer who gained prominence exploring the often overlapping worlds of gay men, drug addicts, transvestites, fashion models and artists.” However patronizing, it does render the arc of Armstrong’s curiosity, and reminds the viewer of the curatorial skew at Artists Space towards the lyricism of Armstrong’s last two decades. That this was a response to a time of acute social crisis—a shelter from brutal mortality and illness—gives this familiar pictorial vocabulary a particular poignance and relevance; its lingering absence some trauma.