Marcus Leatherdale, who created classic portraits of Manhattan’s half-mouths in the 1980s — Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Sydney Biddle Barrows, otherwise known as the Mayflower Madam, all made their way into his Lower East Side studio — died at 22 April at his home in Jharkhand state, India. He was 69.
The cause was suicide, said Claudia Summers, his ex-wife. His partner of 20, Jorge Serio, died in July and Mr Leatherdale suffered a stroke soon after, Ms Summers said, adding that he has also mourned the deaths of the couple’s dog and mother over the past year.
Mr. Leatherdale was the Cecil Beaton of Downtown Manhattan. He photographed a not-yet-famous club boy named Madonna in her ripped jeans and his denim shirt. Performance artist Leigh Bowery was majestic in a tinsel mask, corset and a merkin. Andy Warhol was a Hamlet in a black turtleneck. Susanne Bartsch, the nightlife impressionaria, was a towering presence in red leather.
Montreal-born Mr. Leatherdale had already traveled through India and Afghanistan in a van and attended art school in San Francisco before landing in New York City in 1978 and moving to the Wild West of the Lower East Side. He and Mrs. Summers shared a loft on Grand Street, where Mr. Leatherdale set up his studio.
They didn’t have a traditional marriage, but they were best friends, and he was Canadian, so it made life easier for them to get married. His friend for a time was Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photo studio he also managed. Mr. Leatherdale and Mapplethorpe were a striking couple, dressed as twins in leather and denim, their faces as if painted by Caravaggio, and they often photographed each other.
The Grand Street loft was an unusual household. Mrs. Summers was a dominatrix who worked under the name Mistress Juliette; one of her customers cleaned the case for free. Mapplethorpe assisted Ms. Summers at work by offering her leather pants, a rubber garter belt and S&M tips. Mr. Leatherdale, level-headed, neat and by no means hard-core in spite of his leather uniform, was mocking one morning when he awoke to find an English muffin with one of Mrs. Summers’ stilettos at the kitchen table had been impaled. “What were you up to last night?” he asked her.
Jean-Michel Basquiat often hung out there, playing his bongo drums; so were friends like Cookie Mueller, the doomed dazzling-eyed author and Details magazine contributor who was for a time Mapplethorpe and Mrs. Summers’ drug dealer, and Kathy Acker, the performance artist and novelist. But most of all what happened in the loft was the work of Mr. Leatherdale.
For Details magazine, a chronicle of downtown Manhattan’s creative communities—the galleries, clubs, and boutiques—Mr. Leatherdale had a regular feature titled Hidden Identities, to which he would contribute veiled portraits of his friends.
He photographed Joey Arias, the husky-voiced drag artist, as a Japanese snow princess. Keith Haring was a riotous Santa Claus. Robin Byrd, the lovable stripper and cable TV host, wore only her cowboy boots and a thong. Mrs. Barrows, christened the Mayflower Madam because of her heritage as the head of a high-powered Manhattan escort service, wore a ball gown.
When Details editor Annie Flanders (who died in March) urged Mr. Leatherdale to include those whose fame stretched above 14th Street, he photographed subjects like Jodie Foster, dressing the actress in a satin corset. with a pouf skirt, one arm draped over her face – an atypical costume for someone more comfortable in jeans.
He photographed Mrs. Summers, often in full dress, hundreds of times.
“His photos were a celebration of why we moved to New York City in the first place,” she said, “which was in the midst of that kind of creativity and groundbreaking gender and sexuality terms. Not that we thought of it that way. or spoke in those terms. Marcus photographed the best of who we were, these idealized versions.”
Marcus Andrew Leatherdale was born on September 18, 1952 in Montreal. His father, Jack, was a veterinarian; his mother, Grace Leatherdale, was a homemaker. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute and, once in New York, the School of Visual Arts.
Unlike Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, and to whom he was often compared, and unlike many of his subjects, Mr. Leatherdale seemed less focused on his own fame.
“He didn’t seem to be going for credit in the same way that Robert was,” said David Hershkovits, co-founder of Paper magazine. “He was more reserved. I don’t feel like he was ever distracted by what anyone else was doing. Shiny objects weren’t his thing.”
“Robert was determined to become a star at any cost,” Mr Leatherdale told ID magazine in 2017. “So when I started to become known for my photography, tensions mounted.”
He added: “In the beginning we were artistic comrades, until I got recognition. But honestly, NYC is a place where everyone is very career oriented. I was also very ambitious, but not competitive.”
Still, Mr Leatherdale said, with typical self-mockery, that he regarded Mapplethorpe as the ‘more accomplished artist’.
Critics often lumped the two together, even years after Mapplethorpe’s death.
“The work of Marcus Leatherdale has remained somewhat in the shadow of that of his senior colleague Robert Mapplethorpe,” wrote Holland Cotter in a review of Mr. Leatherdale in 1992. “Both take the nude figure as the central image; both show a predilection for theatrically posed and lit studio settings. Where Mapplethorpe went for a combination of shock and smoothness, Mr. Leatherdale’s recent work shows an interest in carefully staged tableaux with a symbolic content.”
During the 1990s, Mr. Leatherdale photographed almost exclusively in India, taking portraits of Hindu holy men, temple beggars, fishermen and pilgrims in the same elegant, classical way that he developed in New York City. He was drawn to the rawness of life there and the spirituality, Ms Summers said. Later, he began to document the Adivasi tribes, a widespread minority population.
“I want to preserve the tradition of these proud people as best I can, kind of like Edward Curtis did with the American Indians,” he told an interviewer in 2016. “My work can be seen as anthropological portraiture, even the vintage New York City work. of the eighties.”
With his partner, Mr. Serio, a makeup artist, made houses in India, New York and Portugal.
Ms Summers and Mr Leatherdale divorced in 2018. He leaves behind a brother, Robert. Information about other survivors was not available.
In 2019, Mr. Leatherdale featured his 1980s work in a show called “Out of the Shadows,” at the Throckmorton Fine Art Gallery in Manhattan, and in a book of the same title, written with Mrs. Summers. It’s a haunting account of a time and place gone – together a true memento mori, as Mrs. Summers put it, “although we didn’t realize it at the time.”
There’s Divine, the star of John Waters’ “Pink Flamingos,” regal in a satin shirt, crowned in a beehive. There are also Mrs. Mueller, Tina Chow, Mapplethorpe and others who would soon die of AIDS. Stephen Reichard, once a handsome art dealer and consultant who liked to dress in sharp, expensive suits, is naked and skeletal with AIDS, a pieta on a hard wooden chair. It was his decision to be photographed this way in 1988 and to climb the three flights of stairs to Mr Leatherdale’s loft on his own, though he struggled to do so. Mr. Reichard died a few weeks later.
“I didn’t realize I was archiving an era that was going to die out,” said Mr. Leatherdale recently. “I just came by. This is exactly what we intended. Of course you think you’ll be twenty forever.”