“It was amazing coming from a culture of ‘No, you can’t do that,’” he says, “to the gay world of ‘Oh, yes, you can.’'
, a young Bianchi poses in front of a mounted camera as he stares into a mirror. The story behind that particular photo is that the camera was a gift from his former employer at Columbia Pictures, where Bianchi served as a corporate lawyer before quitting to become an artist. His bosses assured him that he could always return if his new career didn’t pan out.
At the time, Bianchi figured that his photos were too risqué for publication. They were “study materials” of the male physique taken during the same period as hisseries, which ultimately made him a recognizable name in the world of photography.
But more than a few he does remember. There’s John, a boy he met on the street who painted Bianchi’s apartment in the nude over the course of several months. There’s Joey, with whom Bianchi was “head over heels in love” for a spell in the late ’70s. And there’s Harold, a “bright spirit” who found Bianchi under the “dark cloud” of AIDS in the 1980s. “You can be sad tomorrow,” Harold once told Bianchi right after he’d learned of a friend’s imminent death. “But tonight you’re going dancing with me.
Today, Bianchi lives in an art-strewn home in Palm Springs with his husband, Ben Smales, far from the one-bedroom Manhattan apartment where he documented all of that love and loss. In retrospect, Bianchi thinks that everything he’s ever made has been a “challenge to homophobia.” That’s the utopia he wants to pass on in his photos’ soft-focus ecstasy to the kids scrolling Tumblr and the teens playing with similar forms of self-expression on Instagram.
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