The Piers

The first book devoted solely to Stanley Stellar's photographs of Manhattan's West Side piers, an essential document of the ruined waterfront that served as daylight sanctuary, cruising ground, and open-air studio for New York's queer community in the decade before AIDS and demolition erased it.

Drawn from Stellar's vast archive, the book presents more than 70 color and black-and-white documentary, portrait, and street photographs made at the piers from the late 1970s through the late 1980s, when the structures were officially torn down. Among the subjects is photographer Peter Hujar, seen in Peter at the Door (1981). The volume opens with a new essay by art historian Desiree Mitton and includes an extensive interview with Stellar by artist Gabriel Martinez. Edited by Sam and Daniel Kapp with clothbound design by Honza Zamojski, it was produced on the occasion of Stanley Stellar: The Piers, the inaugural exhibition at Kapp Kapp's Tribeca gallery (January 15 – February 19, 2022) and the first survey of this body of work.

Stellar (b. 1945, Brooklyn) has photographed gay life in New York since the years following Stonewall, from Christopher Street to his Tribeca studio, building one of the most sustained visual records of the city's gay community. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, and Yale University Art Gallery, and this volume joins earlier publications including Stellar Men (1992).