Join ICP to celebrate the launch of MATTE Magazine's latest issue, David Armstrong: Fashion. The first body of work published since Armstrong’s passing in 2014, the survey is a look at the iconic photographer’s fashion imagery from 2002 to 2010.
The event will feature a panel discussion in the ICP Library with editors Matthew Leifheit and Vince Aletti, photographer Ethan James Green, and David Armstrong archivist Colleen Doyle followed by a reception in the ICP cafe.
Free tickets for this conversation are sold out. Walk-ins will be allowed until capacity is reached for those with museum admission access. Join Matte Editions in the ICP shop and cafe after the program from 2-3 PM.
About the Magazine
David Armstrong: Fashion collects 107 fashion photographs made by David Armstrong, who began shooting fashion in the early 2000s, and continued until his death in 2014 at the age of 60. For Armstrong, the production of a fashion set, the stylists, hair and makeup, offered the framework he needed to make his fantasy of decadent queer beauty a reality, and propelled his work to new heights of originality. Ahead of their time, his photographs offered a new, queer and androgynous perspective on the fawning lens of historical precedents like Baron de Meyer, and shone with Armstrong’s undying love of beauty.
This monographic fashion magazine, featuring interviews with editor Lisa Love, stylist Marie-Amélie Sauvé and photographer Ethan James Green, marks the first posthumous publication of Armstrong's work.
Matthew Leifheit is an American photographer, magazine editor, and professor. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the Yale School of Art, Leifheit is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, the journal of emerging photography he has edited and published since 2010. Leifheit was formerly photo director of VICE Magazine, and his photographs have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, TIME, and Artforum. Leifheit’s photographic work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public collections. He is currently on faculty at Pratt Institute and Yale.
Vince Aletti is a critic and curator in New York. From 2005 until 2016, he reviewed photography exhibitions for the New Yorker's Goings on About Town section. Previously, he was the art editor of the Village Voice (1994 to 2005) and the paper's photo critic for 20 years. He writes a regular column about photo books for Photograph magazine and contributes occasional features and reviews to Aperture, Artforum, Document, and other magazines. He is the winner of the 2005 Infinity Award in writing from the International Center of Photography, where he was an adjunct curator in 2009. Aletti co-curated Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now with Carol Squiers and was the curator of This Is Not a Fashion Photograph, both at ICP; he and Squiers worked together on Avedon Fashion 1944-2000, the museum's summer 2009 exhibition, as well as on its Abrams catalog. Male, a book of photographs and other artwork from Aletti’s collection, was published by Andrew Roth's PPP Editions at the end of 2008. The Disco Files 1973-1978, a collection of Aletti's weekly columns on disco, first published in 2009 by DJhistory in the UK, was reissued in 2018 by D.A.P. Phaidon published Aletti’s Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines in 2019.
After studying filmmaking as an undergrad at Rhode Island School of Design, Colleen Doyle began working in film preservation. She worked as the archivist in the Brown University Film Archive restoring the celluloid holdings for many years before moving to New York. She received an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons, where through emotion-centered research, she developed a taxonomy of object attachment. For the past nine years she has worked stabilizing, categorizing, and digitizing David Armstrong’s estate.
Ethan James Green’s distinctive eye for the personal and essential beauty of his subjects has made him one of the most compelling photographers working today. The Michigan-born, New York-based photographer blends the frankness of his native midwest with the breadth and brilliance of his adopted city resulting in portraits of astonishing intimacy that capture and amplify the essence of his subjects. Working in themes such as contemporary identity, sexuality, and style, he has built a body of work singular in its depth and point of view. Green’s first book, Young New York (2019, Aperture), is a collection of portraits taken of friends and collaborators in the parks of downtown New York that chronicles the scope of queer identity of the past decade. His forthcoming, Bombshell (2024, Baron), is a study of feminine performance, erotic costume, and beauty in collaboration with hair stylists Lucas Wilson, Jimmy Paul, and Sonny Molina. Elaborating on his highly personal vision of New York’s artistic community, Green founded New York Life Gallery in the fall of 2022. The Chinatown-based gallery invites visitors into a circle of downtown artists with exhibitions and programming that centers on emerging and mid-career artists, unknown archives, and 20th-century artworks. His work has appeared in such publications as Aperture, Arena Homme +, Dazed, Double Magazine, Foam Magazine, i-D, L’Uomo Vogue, M le Monde, Perfect, The New Yorker, Time, Vogue, Vogue Italia, W Magazine, and WSJ Magazine. He has also collaborated with a range of fashion labels, among them Alexander McQueen, Dior, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu, Prada, Tom Ford, and Versace.
