“I loved the seediness of that time” From Hollywood Royalty to New York hustlers, Gary Lee Boas reflects on an indelible career and an incredible life
His candid images of the great and good have captivated the likes of Sophia Coppola, David LaChapelle and John Waters. Yet Gary Lee Boas’s own life is far from ordinary; from snapping the stars to working at Studio 54, the 75 year old has seen – and done – it all.
A beguiling Diane Keaton beaming and clasping her hands. Elizabeth Taylor and Halston grinning in the back of a car. A young hustler leaning on a lamppost outside a deli. Bette Davis, cigarette in hand, in full fur. John Lennon in an Elvis jacket walking through a hotel lobby with Yoko. Groups of men congregating on the street outside legendary Greenwich Village gay bar Badlands.
All shot during the seventies and eighties on a Brownie Instamatic by one man: untrained photographer Gary Lee Boas who would, simply, point and shoot. “The first Brownie Instamatic I had would burn my fingers every time I changed the bulb. That’s why a lot of my pictures are not focused or sharp,” he points out when we met in London last April, “because people were going somewhere or in movement.”
Gary, 75, insists he’s a fan rather than a professional. “If you handed me a camera today that had gone wrong, I’d have no idea how to fix it, and I don’t want to know. I’m more worried about capturing the moment rather than whether the lighting is right.” Yet there is an unguarded beauty, an unfiltered rawness in his work that arrestingly captures the feel, the tone and the textures of those times. The informality and sheer volume of his practice is equanimous in its reverence for celebrity as it is sex workers.
NEW YORK SEX PHOTOS SERIES (1979-1985)
Even to this day, I have people gravitating to me. I call them freaks, but they ain’t freaks. I’m the freak! Somehow I would connect with them because they felt they could come up and talk to me and I wasn’t going to be judgmental. Even now, I still ask, I just don’t shoot
GARY LEE BOAS
And his images have had real influence; David LaChapelle and Mel Ottenberg are fans, while Gary counts Sophia Coppola and John Waters among collectors of his work. “I love John and his movies because it’s all freaks. I can’t believe it when people don’t know Pink Flamingos. It’s an iconic movie.”
Picking up a camera in the late 60’s while in his mid-teens, the first image Gary took was of Margareta Arvidsson, a Swedish Miss Universe who was opening a hotel in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Shortly after, singer and Broadway star Robert Goulet came to town. “So now I was meeting a ‘star’ and I was watching women go crazy. I was hooked.” Magnetised by the power of these personalities, he was soon joining his watch-maker mother on her work trips to New York, where he would patiently wait at stage doors and TV studios, capturing everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin in the glare of his flash.
While he might not be a trained artist, Gary wasn’t, still isn’t, paparazzi. “When I started doing the pictures in high school, it was like, Sure, little boy take a picture. But even now, I still ask, I don’t just shoot. As time went on, people knew me, and knew that I was safe, that I had no ill intention. I just wanted a photo. As you see in the photos, most people were very cooperative and made eye contact.”
Gary’s own life has been as remarkable as those whose photos he’s taken. Moving from Lancaster to New York in the seventies to study acting (“I loved the seediness of that time!”) his jobs included being a dancer in the Broadway production of Chicago (“I didn’t realise then I was working with huge choreographers like [Bob Fosse] and [his girlfriend] Ann Reinking who are icons now”), a fixer for porn stars (“my house became like porn rehab”) and a barback and gogo dancer at Studio 54 – “it was like Sodom and Gomorrah,” he cackles. “I loved it, though it was hard to get work done, collecting glasses while people were giving blow jobs and doing lines of cocaine!”
Gary’s mother died of cancer when he was 24, so he moved back to live in the family home, and managed a local porn store while continuing to travel to New York and LA – and later further afield – to shoot both Hollywood royalty and hustlers cruising on the Piers. “My whole day was photographing assholes, one way or the other,” he laughs.
Gary now has over 200,000 images in his archive, which he has previously collated into two books; Starstruck: Photographs From A Fan (1999) and New York Sex: 1979-1985 (2003). And he’s still working hard. When we meet at a cafe near Abney Park Cemetery, Gary has just returned from working in Amsterdam. A few days later, he will be at the Devil Wears Prada stage door to shoot Vanessa Williams and after London he’ll pop to Paris, before finally heading home.
With plans for a new book and a London exhibition in the pipeline — his last in the city was in 2001 at The Photographer’s Gallery — Gary’s influence, and archive, continues to grow.
ANDY WARHOL (1978)
DIANA RIGG (1966 – 1980)
SYLVESTER STALLONE (1966 – 1980)
MERYL STREEP (1966 – 1980)
DAVID BOWIE (1966 – 1980)
You’ve had quite an extraordinary life. Take us back to your beginnings growing up in Lancaster.
I was an only child, basically raised by my mom. My dad was a bricklayer who worked for Grace Kelly’s father, a builder out of Philadelphia, so he’d go on assignments for weeks at a time. I was very shy and very awkward as a child. When they shut the school door, I would get sick. I felt like I was in prison, in a cage. I would never have thought this Gary could have existed, considering I’d have rather crawled under a table than be noticed. To put myself around the famous and wannabe famous, to know them and then go home and watch them in movies? I would never have thought it.
Why did you start hanging around stage doors?
I was 15 when I first hit New York, my mom took me to see Sweet Charity with Gwen Verdin. We went to the stage door and when she came out, she was so sweet to me. I started hitting the talk shows and then travelling to theatres around [the East coast]I began to build a rapport with people like Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain. I’d be meeting Ella Fitzgerald, Fifth Dimension. There would be my mom and I and this woman named Celia and her mother. People like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton would walk out and Burton would grab Celia, who smelt quite strongly of urine, and kiss her. I thought, Wow, the rapport this woman has with these people who love and trust her because she spent the time to be there to be with them.
You also clearly made people feel so comfortable.
Even to this day, I have people gravitating to me. I call them freaks, but they ain’t freaks. I’m the freak! Somehow I would connect with them because they felt they could come up and talk to me and I wasn’t going to be judgmental. Even now, I still ask, I just don’t shoot. And now I usually get my picture taken with them because when I think I was with Audrey Hepburn or Bette Davis and I didn’t ask for a photo, I regret it.
You collated many of those photos into Starstruck: Photographs From A Fan.
Yes, they’re all pictures taken in the 60s and 70s on my Brownie. When we put it together, we had to think about a lot of things; the image itself, the star. We did a series of blurry pictures because we wanted to get across that I was a one-shot guy cos I had to change the flashbulb every single time. If the camera was out of focus, I had one shot, I got what I got. But it turned out great and I realised I’d created a time capsule.
TINA TURNER (1966 – 1980)
DIANE KEATON (1966 – 1980)
JOAN CRAWFORD (1966 – 1980)
LIZ AND HALSTON (1966 – 1980)
HARRISON FORD
You were a young gay man living in New York in the 70s—what a time politically, socially, culturally!
I loved New York. There was something that got my adrenaline going about walking around 42nd street, where people said you shouldn’t go. Well, hell, I lived on 43rd, a block over. At the end of the night, I enjoyed walking down looking at all the porn movies and the prostitutes and people working the corners and the doorways. And then on Eighth Avenue there was the Haymarket, a hustler bar that older men would go to and young stud puppies would come and stand out front. I was around 19, so I was approached a lot. They thought I was hustling, but, no, I was chasing stars all night long!
You have some impressive collectors, including Elton John.
Yes. I showed at the Photographer’s Gallery [curated byHedi El Kholti] in 2001. And David [Furnish] came in with the Pet Shop Boys and bought a print of mine. Sophia Coppola is a big fan, Warren Beatty too.
NEW YORK SEX PHOTOS SERIES (1979-1985)
NEW YORK SEX PHOTOS SERIES (1979-1985)
NEW YORK SEX PHOTOS SERIES (1979-1985)
Do you feel like your work has been understood?
I got to meet the Mario Testino’s and the Annie Leibowitz’s, we were shown at the same galleries, and they treated me as an equal. At that point I was, but I couldn’t believe it myself, that I had that status, even though I was being employed by Vanity Fair or whatever, to do an assignment. The few I did do, I hated, because it wasn’t my candid, capturing the moment. I hated it because I had to “produce”.
Are there celebrities you’re still interested in taking photos of?
Hmm. I’ve met some people on a press line, rather than one to one. So, I’ve met and photographed most of them; Cate Blanchett, Charlize Theron. There’s people like that I want a minute with. I’d love to sit down and have a conversation with Helen Mirren cos that woman intrigues the shit out of me.
What does life look like for you now?
I’m living in Lancaster and I’ve been working on a second Starstruck for two years. Most publishing companies want you to hand a book to them, all done. I don’t have the technology, sitting down, computerising, colourising, digitalising, all this shit. Well, I started digitalising and at least now I got all the 126 film, the Brownie, digitalized. But I’ll never get it done in this lifetime.
I got to meet the Mario Testino’s and the Annie Leibowitz’s, we were shown at the same galleries, and they treated me as an equal. At that point I was, but I couldn’t believe it myself, that I had that status, even though I was being employed by Vanity Fair or whatever, to do an assignment. The few I did do, I hated, because it wasn’t my candid, capturing the moment. I hated it because I had to produce
GARY LEE BOAS
NEW YORK SEX PHOTOS SERIES (1979-1985)
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