From Pacifico Silano’s article for Time Magazine:
My most recent project, “Male Fantasy Icon,” furthers the themes I’ve explored in the past. By creating imagery with Al Parker, one of the most famous gay porn stars of the 1970s, I’ve produced photographs that memorialize and draw attention to a lost generation of gay men. The process of making these new pictures and reworking images from the past has allowed me to catalog and emphasize a neglected history, one that is imbued with my own fantasies of a place and time I feel I know, but that I never lived through.
In creating all of these photographs, I have gained a better understanding of what life might have been like for my uncle. I’ll never hear his stories first-hand, but something has nevertheless been passed on. Sometimes I like to think that he’s guiding me through my own work. When I’m lost for an idea in the studio, I’ll look up at that old Polaroid and I’ll remember how my journey began.