James Bidgood, who elevated erotic gay photography to an art form in the 1960s and 1970s with his carefully staged phantasmagoric images, and the anonymous director behind “Pink Narcissus,” a gay film released in 1971 that became something of a cult classic, died on January 31. in Manhattan. He was 88.
Brian Paul Clamp, director of his gallery, ClampArt, said his death in a hospital was caused by complications related to Covid-19.
Mr. Bidgood, who came to New York from Wisconsin at age 18, was a drag performer at Club 82 in the East Village in the 1950s, where he also occasionally designed sets and costumes. In the early 1960s, he took photos for men’s physique magazines such as Muscleboy.
“They were dimly lit and uninteresting,” he told DailyExpertNews in 2011. “Playboy had girls in furs, feathers and lights. They had faces like beautiful angels. I couldn’t understand why boy pictures weren’t like that.”
He tried to change that. He staged pictures, mostly in his Manhattan apartment, that were lavish fantasies full of references to mythology, adventurous lighting and props, and attractive men—sometimes in costume, sometimes out of nowhere. The photos, some of which made it to magazine covers, were both erotic and funny campy.
“Enchanted scenes of yearning divine figures in ersatz splendor are rendered with such a theatricality of gesture, mood, color, texture and substance that they parody the very desire they are meant to arouse,” wrote Philip Gefter of Mr. Bidgood in the photography magazine Diaphragm in 2008.
In early 1963, Mr. Bidgood also filmed the 1971 film that would turn into “Pink Narcissus,” the loosely plotted tale of a gay con man’s fantasies. mr. Bidgood not only directed it, but also designed all the costumes and sets, most of which (including a men’s room with a row of foam core urinals) were located in his apartment.
Vincent Canby, who reviewed the film in The Times when it opened in two Manhattan theaters in May of that year, dismissed it as “a passive, tacky-decorated surreal fantasy from that pre-gay activist era when homosexuals hid in closets and read novels about sensitive young men who committed suicide because they could not go on.”
But neither Mr. Neither Canby nor the film’s audience knew whose work it was; Mr. Bidgood’s backers had taken over the project from him and released a version of the film that he didn’t like, and his name was removed from the credits. For years, as the film gained popularity in the gay world, guessing who made the film was a parlor game. Andy Warhol’s name was often suggested, among other things.
Ultimately, the role of Mr. Bidgood is known, especially after the publication, in 1999, of ‘James Bidgood’, a monograph featuring a biography of Bruce Benderson. The film started popping up at festivals across the country and the largely forgotten photography of Mr. Bidgood from the 1960s and 1970s was reassessed. In 2001 there were exhibitions of his photographs in Italy, in Provincetown, Mass., and at the Paul Morris Gallery in Manhattan.
Ken Johnson, who reviewed the Paul Morris exhibition in The Times, called Mr Bidgood “a brave pioneer at a time when art photography was overwhelmingly straight (both formally and sexually) and the idea that pornography could contribute to artistically serious projects was almost unthinkable .”
Photographer Lissa Rivera curated another exhibition in 2019, ‘Reveries’, at the Museum of Sex in New York.
“Since working with Bidgood’s materials,” she said by email, “I have understood the great importance of his work to so many gay people, who have shared with me that they had not seen homosexuality as beautiful in the same way before. she James’ work.”
His photos, she noted, were taken at a time when erotic imagery and gay lifestyles faced significant legal restrictions.
“His work for male physique magazines was on the verge of legality,” she said. “Despite this, Bidgood was never ashamed or put in the closet. He lived a life that was completely uncompromising and expressive.”
James Alan Bidgood was born on March 28, 1933 in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and grew up in the Madison area. As a boy, he said, he was drawn to the images of the Ziegfeld Follies and similar spectacles, a fascination that was reflected in his photographs years later.
“He didn’t consider himself an artist per se,” said Ms. Rivera, “but instead saw himself driven by the need to create visual evidence of his desire, which arose from a little boy captivated by Hollywood music. musicals. Hollywood movies were steeped in strange subtext, often courtesy of their creators in the closet. Bidgood brought this subtext out with clear, direct expression, creating his own visual and symbolic language.”
In 1951 he moved to New York.
“New York was exactly what it looked like in MGM musicals,” he told Another Man magazine in 2019. “It was fast and it was more exciting than your second orgasm.”
He put his skill into making costumes for use at Club 82, where he also performed under the name Terry Howe. He studied at Parsons School of Design from 1957 to 1960, after which he supported himself as a window dresser and costume designer. Clients hired him to design their outfits for community balls, and once he started taking pictures, he would sometimes recycle those dresses to create the scenes for the pictures he took in his apartment.
For his first series of homoerotic photos, ‘Water Colors’, he created the ocean by scattering silver lamé over the floor of his apartment and made a cave of wax paper. For ‘Willow Tree’ from the mid-1960s, in which a naked man reclines in a bed of flowers, he transformed the meadow from colorful pieces of a dress he made for a client to wear to a Junior League event. ball.
Mr. Bidgood, who Mr. Clamp said had lived in the same apartment on West 14th Street in Manhattan since 1974, is survived by a brother, Richard.
Mr. Bidgood’s performer, Kelly McKaig, said Mr. Bidgood picked up his camera again in the 2000s and learned Photoshop, digital audio editing, and other skills; he even created a three-hour autobiographical audio game, “FAG – the Pretty Good Life of Jimmy Bundle.” But he was withdrawn in his last years, rarely left his apartment, and he was struggling financially. A GoFundMe page wants to fund a funeral and create an archive of his work.
The photos of Mr. Bidgood were often referred to as “camp,” a term whose definition has changed somewhat over the decades within the gay world and beyond. In 2019 mr. Bidgood was one of six artists, performers and others who identified with the term and participated in a discussion for The Times about what exactly it means.
“Shouldn’t camp at least make you giggle?” he asked. “Camp to me is like a woman going to her husband’s funeral, dressed in an orange Day-Glo dress and a large feather boa on her head.”