'Jack Pierson’s Seductive Ode to the Queer Community' - AnOther Magazine

29 May 2024

“I think photography has always been the queer medium; of all the modes of expression, photography is the gay one,” Jack Pierson – who shot Mike Faist for the cover of Another Man –tells me on the phone from Lisson Gallery, which is now showing his first solo exhibition in London in over 20 years. “It’s not painting, a heterosexual medium that, for the long run of history, has been a competition for legacy,” he continues. “Photography is the one that will fade, get ripped up, and be thrown out because it was just a photograph.”

All of that would begin to change with the arrival of the New Color Movement, headed by photographers like Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, and Joel Meyerowitz, who crafted large format works that revelled in their painterly mastery of the medium. “At that time, the only way you could make photography seem like ‘this is art’ was to show how hard it was to get it technically perfect,” Pierson says. “That was the way to show it wasn’t as simple as taking a snapshot.”

But there was another way, one that would emerge at the same time in the groundbreaking work of the Boston School, a group of young art students including Pierson, Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tabboo!, Gail Thacker, and David Armstrong. Embracing the DIY ethos of punk, they rejected the stringent formalism of the times in favour of a visceral sense of intimacy, turning the camera on themselves, their friends, and lives.

Read more of the interview via AnOther here.