David Armstrong’s return to Arles could only take place at the LUMA Foundation. Ten years after his death, the American photographer is presented in a sensitive and elegant exhibition on level -3 of the tower designed by Frank Gehry. Here, there’s no pretension to a definitive retrospective. Simply original prints, contact sheets, a few documents, and images suspended in time, in black and white or color, carried by a soft light, in the shadows, almost like at a movie theater.
Born in 1954 in Arlington, Massachusetts, David Armstrong is part of the legendary “Boston School,” alongside Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Jack Pierson. In the 1980s, he developed a distinctive style: portraits of young men, lovers, or friends, photographed in the privacy of an apartment, in the silence of a hazy morning, facing a faded wall, or in nature. His gaze is direct, raw, and magnificently human. A way of being in the world, between assumed fragility and gentle insolence.
The exhibition presented in Arles brings together several dozen portraits, all taken by the photographer himself. Some are accompanied by marks, annotations, or framing attempts. Some are even warped by time. It’s a naked work. Throughout the exhibition, the faces respond to each other, from Nan Goldin, his close friend, to Cookie Mueller, an icon of New York counterculture, to strangers with magnetic gazes. These portraits, often taken with a view camera or medium format, are as much painting as photography. They capture the skin, the texture, the breath of a moment. Enough to give the impression of actually having the person in front of you. In 2011, David Armstrong told The New York Times: “Photographing is like a seduction, it’s intimate when you’re alone with them. It always has been this act, where you are trying to get the subjects to reveal themselves before the camera.”
It is thus a constellation of faces that populate the large room. The second room is devoted to color images, in slideshows on giant screens, reminiscent of the format used by Nan Goldin, except that they are silent. These lesser-known images were taken in part in New York, Berlin, or Paris, at parties, apartments, in the countryside, in a style close to that of the American photographer.
With David Armstrong, everything speaks of a generation. Of a way of embracing life, the margins, bodies, desires. Armstrong does not photograph youth: he photographs a certain idea of youth, always on the edge. A fluid identity, unclaimed, but fully assumed. A man in a bath towel near a bed, a lost gaze in an ageless room, a smile frozen between two sips, a seductive face emerging from the water… Author Nick Vogelson writes about him: “His photographs, by the effect of light or gesture, reveal a will of non-committal transcendence. That transcendent disposition speaks to the often melancholic nature of photography.”
The exhibition also features several contact sheets, as if to recall the artisanal dimension of film photography. Above all, to demonstrate that David Armstrong was a prolific artist. These rare, fragile, and sometimes scratched objects bear witness to a physical connection with the image. We think of Diane Arbus’s negatives, Larry Clark’s archives. This same relationship to matter, time, and presence. These sheets also reveal the photographer’s rhythm, his hesitations, his choices, and make the construction of the gaze palpable.
“Goldin’s work is very immediate; at times it’s as if the camera doesn’t exist, which is what made it so shocking, so notable at the time,” explains Matthieu Humery, who co-curated the Luma show alongside the artist Wade Guyton, a friend of Armstrong’s who runs the photographer’s archive. Armstrong, on the other hand, took a more painterly approach, Humery says. “He actually studied painting first and was very into art history. He didn’t do a huge amount of preparation for his photographs, but these aren’t snapshots taken right away. He always took the time to compose the scene.” It is this, the curator suggests, that upon first glance gives the work a more classical appearance – “perhaps that’s why it drew less attention at the time.”
In 2009, David Armstrong was already presented at the Rencontres d’Arles, in an exhibition designed by Nan Goldin. Fifteen years later, the circle is complete. This new presentation is broader, perhaps more mature. It’s hard not to be struck by the persistence of the faces. They remain in your mind. They gently haunt. As if Armstrong, even gone, continued to watch over you from his images. When he focused on a new person it was as if he’d shined a bright light on them. When he shined that light on me it brought me to life, ” Goldin says. Armstrong, for his part, reminds us that there is a photography without noise, capable of freezing moments of absolute intimacy. A photography that takes the time to look at, quite simply. And which, 30 years later, continues to move us.
The exhibition “David Armstrong” is on view at the LUMA Foundation in Arles (France) until October 7, 2025.
