Tom Bianchi

Focuses on people who are different, who might use equipment such as wheelchairs or special computers, who are more like you than you might think, and suggests ways to interact with them.

In such photoessays as Out of the Studio and Extraordinary Friends, Bianchi helped to establish new levels of success and acceptability for collections of photographic male nudes. This new collection is an unabashed celebration of male beauty that proves there is no shame in allowing the body to stand for beauty itself. Photos.

"Growing up in the 1950s, Tom Bianchi would head into downtown Chicago and pick up 25-cent "physique" magazines at newsstands. In one such magazine, he found a photograph of bodybuilder Glenn Bishop on Fire Island. "Fire Island sounded exotic, perhaps a name made up by the photographer," he recalls in the preface to his latest monograph. "I had no idea it was a real place. Certainly, I had no idea then that it was a place I would one day call home." In 1970, fresh out of law school, Bianchi began traveling to New York, and was invited to spend a weekend at Fire Island Pines, where he encountered a community of gay men. Using an SX-70 Polaroid camera, Bianchi documented his friends' lives in the Pines, amassing an image archive of people, parties and private moments. These images, published here for the first time, and accompanied by Bianchi's moving memoir of the era, record the birth and development of a new culture. Soaked in sun, sex, camaraderie and reverie, Fire Island Pines conjures a magical bygone era." -- Publisher's description

In 1975, Tom Bianchi moved to New York City and took a job as in-house counsel at Columbia Pictures. That first year Tom was given a Polaroid SX - 70 camera by Columbia Pictures at a corporate conference. He took that camera to the Pines on summer weekends, those pictures became the book 'Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975 - 1983' published in 2013. Now, some 44 years later, we finally get a first look at another extraordinary collection of Polaroids by Tom taken in his NYC apartment at 63 East 9th Street. Whereas 'Fire Island' is an expansive communal experience happening on a sunny sand bar outside of the city under huge open skies, Tom's New York apartment was an intimate track-lit den, a safe stage where he and his friends invited each other to play out their erotic night games. Tom's 'New York City Polaroids' take us behind the closed door of his apartment, "Back then we were in the early days of a revolution that seemed inevitably headed to a more loving, playful and tolerant way of being. We were innocents", Bianchi recalls. This is an essential companion book to 'Fire Island Pines' and an important document of urban gay life.