Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983

Tom Bianchi carried a Polaroid SX-70 to Fire Island Pines through the second half of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, and the pictures gathered in this 2013 book are as close as photography gets to a diary of that place.

Published by Damiani in 2013, the 210-page hardcover reproduces Bianchi's instant-film images of the men who summered in the Pines: on the beach, on decks, in bed, at parties that ran past sunrise. Bianchi pairs the pictures with his own written recollections, tracing how he first read about Fire Island in a magazine as a teenager and eventually made it his home after law school. Edmund White contributes a companion text, situating the Polaroids within the wider literature of gay life on Fire Island in that period.

The Pines in these years functioned as a rare space where gay men could be openly affectionate and undressed without consequence, and Bianchi's camera, small and immediate, let him work without staging or self-consciousness. Shot in the years just before AIDS reshaped that community, the book has become one of the primary photographic records of Fire Island's gay culture at its most unguarded, and it remains the best-known of Bianchi's several Polaroid collections.