Jean Dykstra writes for AIPAD Exposure:
In the /New York Times/’ obituary of James Bidgood, who died in 2022 at the age of 88, curator Lissa Rivera observed that he was “driven by the need to create visual evidence of his desire.” Technicolor examples of that visual evidence are on view at CLAMP through August 29 in “James Bidgood: Dreamlands.” Bidgood staged his photographs in his apartment, making the costumes, creating waves with silver lamé, and recycling ball gowns for drapery, backdrops, and fantastical theatrical elements. The director of the 1971 film “Pink Narcissus,” which eventually became a cult classic, Bidgood left his native Wisconsin for New York, where he was a drag performer and a photographer for men’s physique magazines in the 1950s and ’60s. His later photographs, which drew on mythological and theatrical characters, include two young men dressed as harlequins standing before a stained-glass window, a blue-eyed blond man beneath an archway decorated with paper flowers, and a seductive Pan, holding a pan flute. A large-scale print of that image, which appears on the cover of a recently published monograph by Salzgeber, is included in the show.
Browse the exhibition “James Bidgood | Dreamlands” at CLAMP
Browse all of James Bidgood’s work at CLAMP