The Photographer Who Documented the Struggle for Gay Liberation
Fred McDarrah made singular portraits of Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag, and other luminaries of the 1960s. But his photojournalism also cemented the era’s visual style—and defined a political movement.
Fred McDarrah, Untitled (Youths at Stonewall Uprising), New York, June 28, 1969
In Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture (2024), Robert Newman, one of the newsweekly’s art and design directors, remembered Fred W. McDarrah as “the soul of the Voice. He not only had absorbed all the institutional memory of the place, but he basically felt that he personified the Voice, which he said many times. ‘I am the Village Voice!’” McDarrah’s claim was not an overstatement. From his hiring in 1962 to his death in 2007, he worked as the staff photographer—the paper’s very first—and a picture editor, covering the visual arts, music, literature, pop culture, nightlife, and politics during a rollercoaster period in which all these fields were in tremendous flux. In so doing, he developed a compelling visual identity for what became the most significant, influential, and best-selling alternative weekly of the twentieth century.
McDarrah was never a household name like Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, or Robert Mapplethorpe, but he was one of his generation’s most essential architects and arbiters of photojournalism, and his immeasurable impact on the cultural landscape in New York receives a full accounting in the exhibition Fred W. McDarrah: Pride and Protest, curated by Marilyn Satin Kushner and Rebecca Klassen at The New York Historical. McDarrah not only documented countercultural life, he also created a fabulous historical record of it; indeed, he was more than the Voice, in that his work, in a way, encapsulated the changing times.
Although McDarrah made singular portraits of Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and other such Beatnik luminaries, he is best known for arresting photographs of LGBTQ artists, writers, and activists as well as the local gay liberation and AIDS movements. There’s unsmiling Susan Sontag, smoking in the shadows of the Mills Hotel in 1962; and there’s Marsha P. Johnson glowing at the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1971. McDarrah himself was not gay (he had a wife and son), yet he zealously and sensitively chronicled queer art and politics, even in the years before he started contributing to the Voice. His 1994 photobook Gay Pride: Photographs from Stonewall to Today, published to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, was reprinted on the event’s fiftieth anniversary in 2019. Iconic images of Candy Darling with a fatigued expression on the set of The David Susskind Show in 1970 and an unrelenting ACT UP demonstrator being yanked away by four armed policemen from the “Target City Hall” action in 1989 are now more frequently being transported from the printed page to the museum walls.
Pride and Protest presents over sixty black-and-white photographs that date from 1959 to 1993, reproductions of contact sheets, a book of bound newspapers, and two daybooks, and seeks to tell three intersecting stories: the rise of queer culture and activism, the emergence of the Voice as a community venue, and McDarrah’s own photographic trajectory. In the curators’ wall text, however, there is a greater attention to detailing the identities and cultural contributions of the legendary individuals in the pictures than to elucidating McDarrah’s specific encounters with his subjects and general approaches to editing, printing, and circulating his work beyond the Voice.
Regardless, it’s often his images without underground celebrities—and even without people at all—that speak most forcefully. As one of the only photographers to document the earth-shattering riot at the Stonewall Inn, McDarrah captured, among other things, the tame graffiti on the establishment’s boarded-up windows, which featured messages like “legalize gay bars and lick the problem” and a call for calm from the homophile Mattachine Society of New York. These rare photographs of textual assertions beg to be contrasted with a particularly devastating image of political speech that comes later in the exhibition: Duane Kearns Puryear’s panel for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt during its display on the National Mall in 1992. “I MADE THIS PANEL MYSELF,” it proclaims. “IF YOU ARE READING IT, I AM DEAD.”
All photographs © the artist/MUUS Collection
The first version of this exhibition was curated by Vince Aletti, a longtime writer and editor at the Voice who knew McDarrah well, at the 2023 edition of Paris Photo. Interestingly, after years of being a music critic, Aletti started to focus on photography once McDarrah stopped writing short photo exhibition reviews, and thereby turned the Voice into a premiere platform for photo criticism, further legitimizing the medium’s status as a fine art. While there is no doubt that Pride and Protest likewise intends to elevate a vital body of work by an extraordinary photojournalist, and justifiably so, one can only imagine that nothing compares to the bygone experience of relishing these pictures in their glorious newsprint immediacy.
Fred W. McDarrah: Pride and Protest is on view at the New York Historical through July 13, 2025.
