63 E 9th Street: NYC Polaroids 1975-1983
A charged, intimate portrait of gay New York in the years before AIDS, Tom Bianchi's 63 E 9th Street gathers the Polaroids he made in his East Village apartment between 1975 and 1983.
Bianchi moved to New York in 1975 to work as in-house counsel at Columbia Pictures, which gave him the Polaroid SX-70 he carried to Fire Island on summer weekends those beach pictures became the 2013 book Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983. Published by Damiani some forty-four years after they were taken, the 262 images collected here are that book's interior counterpart. Where Fire Island offered a communal experience under huge open skies, the apartment at 63 E 9th Street was, in Bianchi's words, an intimate, track-lit den, a safe stage where he and his friends played out erotic night games. The New York Times called the work "a compelling, charged portrait of gay men in New York, depicted in their sexual prime in the golden years before the major devastation of AIDS."
Bianchi (b. 1945, Chicago) left corporate law in the 1980s to work full-time as an artist, and over three decades of monographs, from Out of the Studio to the Fire Island Polaroids, has built one of the most sustained photographic records of American gay life. 63 E 9th Street is the essential companion volume to Fire Island Pines and an important document of urban gay culture.
