Stanley Stellar was on Canal Street one Sunday morning in 1976 when a young man with the body of a murderer walked by. Like many of New York's street photographers, Stellar is curious and nosy, and can be adept at disguising flirtation as flattery when necessary to put straight men at ease.
Stellar convinced the man to lift his t-shirt for a photo, and in return Stellar got a prominent chest and a colorful new tattoo. Stellar later received a photo entitled “I Got Birds Too”.
The man's shirt was put back on and the light bulb went off.
“I walked away from this and thought, ‘Oh, this is me,’” Stellar, 79, said in a recent interview at her TriBeCa apartment.
That chance meeting was an awakening that helped Stella take as many unapologetic and original gay photographs as she could in a day for decades. As his nearly 40,000 Instagram followers can attest, he's still at it.
To be clear, Stella is gay. Please save him “queer”.
“I don’t like the way gay people are marginalized and ignored,” he said. “At this point in my life, I’m not going. Oh, yes, I've always been a queer artist.' no.”
From May 1 to 5, Stellar will take on perhaps his biggest stage yet when Kapp Kapp, the queer-focused TriBeCa gallery run by twin brothers Sam and Daniel Kapp, presents his work at Frieze New York, the annual international art fair. It will. Hudson Yards warehouse.
Fifteen of Stellar's “Piers” photographs are on display. It's a snapshot of lazy days and assertive portraits of the gay men who claimed the run-down West Side docks as their social and sexual turf in the 1970s and '80s. Many photos appear in color for the first time. A related photo book, “Stanley Stellar: The Piers,” was reprinted in time for the fair.
Other more acclaimed artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Keith Haring and Gordon Matta-Clark also created art on and off the docks. The Kapp brothers hope Frieze can do for Stellar what the Bronx Museum did in 2019 with a career-defining retrospective of Alvin Baltrop, whose Voodoo photographs were little known.
“Stanley doesn’t fit the narrative that people want of a gay New York City photographer.” said Sam Kapp, who was interviewed on video alongside his brother. “That’s where we saw our position from the beginning: How do we contextualize this legend as it should be?”
Among Stellar's fans is Leo Herrera, a writer and filmmaker whose work explores the AIDS generation. He said he admired the photographer's overall love and appreciation and shameless appreciation for the beauty of gay men and gay sexuality at a time when we were facing the censorship of the '70s and the stigma of the '80s on different platforms. ”
Stellar monologues a mile a minute, grateful to be in Frieze but with questions like: What took so long?
“I know everyone wants to focus on piers, piers, piers,” he said. “I’m too big to just focus on the piers.”
Wearing a light blue shirt and cargo shorts, Stellar toured the rent-stabilized apartment she has lived in since 1974 with Tom Miller, a retired linguist and her partner of 50 years. The house also serves as a studio.
Stellar grew up with his parents and brother in a first-floor apartment on Cortelyou Road on Flatbush Avenue, then “the most bourgeois section of Brooklyn.” He caught the photography bug at the age of 10 when his uncle gave him a viewfinder camera.
Stellar said he was never in the closet because it wasn't a dirty secret for his artistic family to be “out.” His father ran a custom upholstery, upholstery and drapery shop in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and his mother was a “disappointed painter,” as Stella called her. Her mother brought tea and a tray of cookies to the man her son had a crush on one afternoon.
Stellar studied graphic design at Parsons and earned a living working at Art Direction magazine. But as a gay commercial photographer, he struggled to get well-paying work, despite working as a gallery representative for many years.
He freelanced for gay publications and newsweeklies, filling entire file cabinets and binders with contact sheets on everything from Wigstock to model Tommy.
He began to see financial gains in 2019 when the Kapp brothers gave him a solo exhibition at their former gallery in Philadelphia. (His photos sell for $4,000 to $10,000.)
He now felt financially secure for the first time.
Like her good friend Hujar, Stella was a regular at the docks, but said she was there to have sex with Cruz as much as take pictures in the outdoor studio.
“We had nowhere to be in the sunlight, nowhere to be in the light, nowhere where we could see each other,” he said. “And so it was.”
Through his epidemic of photographs of young gay men, Stella reminds us that many gay men of his generation lived to make art, and that their work is as much a testament to their times and communities as it is now. Last summer, GAYLETTER, the queer arts magazine founded by Tom Jackson and Abi Benitez, featured on its cover a stunning photo of a man posing bare-chested in a shabby room on a pier.
Jackson said he sees Stella as an ethnographer for a generation of gay men who are too young to remember AIDS.
“I don’t think he realized he was creating an obituary,” Jackson said.
Filmmaker Herrera puts it differently. “He photographed many people with AIDS when they were still beautiful.”
Stellar is proud of his non-explicit work. He said he has photographed almost every New York City Pride march since the first one in 1970. But he knows that his pier photos may best define him.
“I didn’t ask you what you thought about the piers.” Stellar asked Miller.
“I never asked you either,” Miller said with a laugh. Because we know.”
“He did everything for us.” Stella answered softly. “He took pictures for us.”