Castro to Christopher

The lost world of the "gay paradises" in San Francisco and New York is beautifully documented in this collection of remarkably intimate portraits and street scenes taken by photography activist and chronicler Nicholas Blair from 1979-1986. The lovely, carefree utopia pre-AIDS gay communities offered a long-maligned culture evoke a halcyon existence of peace and acceptance, with only a hint of the dark cloud of the AIDS epidemic looming, and early protests and demands for humane treatment just beginning to take hold.

A New York City native, Nicholas Blair dropped out of high school in 1977 and hit the road, landing in San Francisco, where he helped form an arts commune. With a Leica rangefinder camera given to him by a childhood friend, he honed his craft as a photographer amidst the explosion of LGBTQ life that was taking over from the hippie movement.
From the Castro Valley in San Francisco to the conga-line of Christopher Street that cuts through New York's West Village, there is a vanished world revitalized in the photos of Nicholas Blair. Now an internationally recognized photographer, Blair is compiling these images for the first time, exploring a time and place that altered the cultural makeup of America. Blair's photos of the streets are honest, revealing, evocative, and tender; much like the streets and their theater of play were themselves.

The timeframe of these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, marked a time when post-Stonewall exuberance--the grudging acceptance and tolerance of a life and culture once criminalized--flowered and overflowed in concentrated areas (San Francisco, the West Village, Fire Island) and life was out, in public and in the street. It was a community and world unto itself, before that world became torn apart by the epidemic onslaught to come.