Jackson Davidow

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Articles

When Women Run the World: Gail Thacker's Queer Feminist Marvel

2 months ago | momus.ca | Jane Byrne |Jackson Davidow

In late June 2024, a couple of weeks before Joe Biden withdrew his bid for reelection and Kamala Harris launched her campaign for president, the artist Gail Thacker sent me an email with the cryptic subject line “For your election time please.” Its body simply contained a link to a digital file, her video Devoted (1980). The eight-minute work begins with a lean, mousy man, practically a boy, clad only in diaperlike leather shorts that hold in place a comically pointy dildo.
The Photographer Who Documented the Struggle for Gay Liberation

Jan 9, 2025 | aperture.org | Jackson Davidow

In Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture (2024), Robert Newman, one of the newsweekly’s art and design directors, remembered Fred W. McDarrah as “the soul of the Voice. He not only had absorbed all the institutional memory of the place, but he basically felt that he personified the Voice, which he said many times. ‘I am the Village Voice!’” McDarrah’s claim was not an overstatement.
Elegant Company | Arthur Tress

Oct 28, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Arthur Tress |Jackson Davidow

Toward the end of 1968, Arthur Tress started bringing along his Hasselblad camera on visits to the Ramble. Designed as a paragon of the picturesque in the mid-nineteenth century, the artificial woodland in the middle of New York’s Central Park had become overgrown and derelict, a shadowy cloister teeming with men and queer people in search of erotic contact.
Peter Hujar Died Young. Now, His Striking Photographs of Queer Culture Are Being Resurrected.

Oct 15, 2024 | artnews.com | Jackson Davidow

“Peter got exactly what he wanted,” a friend of Peter Hujar’s told a writer more than a decade ago. Speaking to Cynthia Carr for her biography of David Wojnarowicz, Steve Turtell continued: “He once said to me, ‘I want to be discussed in hushed tones. When people talk about me, I want them to be whispering.’” In case you haven’t noticed, nobody is merely whispering Hujar’s name these days.
Art in America’s Fall “New Talent” Issue Features 20 Artists to Watch

Aug 27, 2024 | artnews.com | Sarah Douglas |Emily Watlington |Maddie Klett |Jackson Davidow

This is a strange and scary time to be making art. Wars continue to rage in Ukraine and Gaza, and a looming United States presidential election could spell the return to power of a charismatic leader with fascist tendencies whose most fervent followers regard him as a kind of savior. These conditions are not so different from those in the late 1920s and ’30s in Europe, when Surrealism flourished as artists labored to process the horrors of World War I and the lead-up to WWII.
Shellburne Thurber’s Analysis

Apr 30, 2024 | brooklynrail.org | Jackson Davidow

Shellburne ThurberAnalysis(Kehrer Verlag, 2023) In Shellburne Thurber’s photos, the doctor may be out, but the photographer is in. From 1998 to 2000, Thurber documented about one hundred psychoanalysts’ offices, initially during a month-long stay in Buenos Aires, and then throughout her home region of New England. Rather than capturing actual therapy sessions, Thurber, who lives in Cambridge, took pictures of the spaces, unoccupied, in between appointments.
Photographer Jason Byron Gavann Takes Us Inside Boston’s Unsung Queer Scene

Apr 11, 2024 | interviewmagazine.com | Jackson Davidow |Emily Sandstrom

“Girl, still on for 5pm tomorrow?” I texted Jason Byron Gavann to confirm our visit. “Yassssss,” he shot back. “I have red and white so just bring your grande culo.” It had been a year-and-a-half since I first dropped by the photographer’s loft in the Artists Building in Fort Point. Though multiple people had told me I needed to look at his photographs of queer Boston and Provincetown, I had no idea I was entering the sanctuary of an icon.
From The Other Side

Feb 22, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Jackson Davidow

In 1971, Bobby Busnach stumbled upon The Other Side, a gay bar in Boston’s Bay Village neighborhood. There, with his stupendous hair and six-inch bubble-toe platforms, he found a community of street kids, drag queens, scare queens, trans women, hustlers, johns, wannabes, dykes, and fag hags. The fifteen-year-old, a survivor of domestic abuse and surreal stays at a state mental hospital and drug rehab facility, had recently come out and was turning tricks on Commonwealth Avenue to support himself.
A Screenwriter's Forgotten Photographs of American Televisions

Nov 16, 2023 | aperture.org | Jackson Davidow

In 1969, shortly after graduating college and returning home to Los Angeles, Dennis Feldman found himself photographing televisions. It was a time when TV organized the American home and society at large, pervading everyday spaces, public and private, and transfixing its consumers as the radio never could. There were three national networks and programming genres galore—quiz shows, soap operas, Westerns, situation comedies, sporting events, the news.
Two Lovers | Jackson Davidow

Sep 7, 2023 | thebaffler.com | Jackson Davidow

Two men, dressed in leather jackets and crotch-hugging dungarees, lean against a chain link fence. One smiles; the other doesn’t. They were once lovers, and the February 1978 special issue of Christopher Street promised an “anatomy” of their affair.