The Hungry Years

A tender, unguarded chronicle of American youth in the shadow of the AIDS era, The Hungry Years gathers Jack Pierson's (b. 1960) early photographs of the 1980s, the images that made his name as a member of the Boston School and that have only grown in stature since they were first editioned in 1990.

Shot among friends and lovers in bedrooms, motels and along the roadsides of an itinerant decade, the photographs are inherently autobiographical, trading in traditional Americana motifs whose bright, distanced surfaces reveal the uncanny running beneath the quotidian. Melancholy and introspective yet buoyed by homoeroticism, seduction and glamour, they frame what Pierson has called his ultimate subject: hope. The 104-page clothbound volume, published by Damiani in 2017 with a tipped-in cover image, opens with an introduction by the poet Eileen Myles and a foreword by photographer Stephen Shore.

Pierson emerged from the Boston School alongside Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe, and has spent more than three decades moving across photography, drawing, painting and his signature found-letter word sculptures to examine the intimate and emotional registers of everyday life. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim, among others the collection also holds his Photology monograph Jack Pierson.