Photographer: James Bidgood

James Bidgood (born March 28, 1933 in Madison, Wisconsin) is an American artist living and working in New York City. Bidgood was noted for his opulent dress designs for masquerading debutantes as well as photographic tributes to young men that appeared in mid-century physique pictorials under the pseudonym Les Folies des Hommes, in homage to the Folies Bergère.

His artistic output has embraced a number of media and disciplines, including music, set and window design, and drag performance. In time, his interests led him to photography and film and it is for this work that he is most widely known. Highly recognizable, his photographs are distinguished by an aesthetic of high fantasy and camp. His work which was inspired by an early interest in Florenz Ziegfeld, Folies Bergère, and George Quaintance has, in turn, served as important inspiration for a slew of artists including Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle. In the late 1950s, Bidgood attended Parsons The New School for Design.

Under the alias Les Folies des Hommes,  Bidgood’s still photography was published in Muscleboy and The Young Physique magazines at the same time as he was working on his two films, Water Colors and Pink Narcissus (see below, after sources).

Bidgood released the film Pink Narcissus in 1971, after filming in his small apartment from 1963 to 1970. The film is a dialogue-free fantasy centered around a young and often naked man. The film took seven years to make, and Bidgood built all the sets and filmed the entire piece in his tiny apartment. He later removed his name from the film because he felt editors had changed his original vision. Consequently, the film bore the word "Anonymous" for the director's credit, and it was misattributed to other directors such as Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger for many years. Pink Narcissus was re-released in 2003 by Strand Releasing.

Bidgood's work is characterized by a heavy reliance on invention. His photographs feature elaborate sets built ground up from the materials of the theater, fashion, design, and fine art. In a profile of the artist published in Aperture, Philip Gefter writes,

Necessity was the mother of invention for Bidgood, who created elaborate photographic tableaux in his small midtown Manhattan studio apartment. His first erotic series was an underwater epic called Water Colors, made in the early 1960s, in which he used a dancer from Club 82 named Jay Garvin as his subject. The underwater atmosphere is completely fabricated; the bottom of the ocean was created with silver lame spread across the floor of Bidgood's apartment; he made the arch of a cave out of waxed paper, and fashioned red lame into the shape of lobster. He coated Garvin with mineral oil and pasted glitter and sequins to his skin so the silver fabric under photographic lights would reflect on his body like water. For weeks at a time, Bidgood would eat and sleep within the sets he constructed in his apartment.

Many contemporary themes are found even in the earliest of Bidgood's work. Camp, identity, erotica, desire, marginality, and performance all figure heavily in his portraits of nude men. Bidgood's complex references to the theater and performance seem to presage Queer articulations of Performance. His techniques, working processes, and masterful use of illusionistic color indicate both a mature understanding of his influences and goals and an important contrast to the art movements of the time the work was first created. In 1999, the art book publisher Taschen published a monograph of his work including biographical images and stills from his film.

In 2005, James Bidgood was honored with a Creative Capital grant which facilitated a return to art photography after a hiatus of nearly 40 years. His current projects include work for Christian Louboutin and Out magazine. In 2008, Taschen included an interview with Bidgood in its publication The Big Penis Book, and published his monograph in 2009. Bidgood's most recent work was featured in Out in February 2009. Bidgood is represented by ClampArt in New York City as well as Larry Collins Fine Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Bidgood, at age 78, oversaw the restoration of Pink Narcissus in 2011. In 2015, now in his 80s, he was asking for donations to help create and maintain a new studio for his on-going work. He has produced new material since 2015 and that work has been exhibited in galleries in New York, London, Paris, and elsewhere.

Sources:

• Benderson, Bruce, text; Bidgood, James, photography. Bidgood: James Bidgood. Köln: Taschen, 1999.
• Edgecomb, Sean Fredric. “Camping out with James Bidgood: The Auteur of Pink Narcissus Tells All”. Bright Lights Film Journal, 1 May 2006.
• Gefter, Philip. “Off to Camp: The Photographs of James Bidgood”. Aperture, Summer 2008.
• Keady, Cameron. “Out of a Dream: James Bidgood”. Gayletter, Issue 2, May 2015.
• Ottaviani, Marion. “Who is James Bidgood, the pope of queer culture ?” Numéro, 12 Jan 2017.
• Ryan, Hugh. “Gay Photography Legend James Bidgood Needs Help Buying a Camera”. Vice, 11 Jan 2015.
• Van Meter, William. “A Gay Cult Classic Re-Emerges”. New York Times, 18 Mar 2011.