Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975–1983 (2013)

• Published: Damiani, Bologna, 2013
• Contributors: Edited by Ben Smales; introduction by Edmund White; text by Tom Bianchi
• Edition: First edition, first printing
• Binding: Hardcover, dust jacket
• Pages: 210 pp.
• Dimensions: 26 x 23 cm (10.25 x 9 in)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 978-88-6208-270-9
• Condition: Fine in a near fine dust jacket.

Between 1975 and 1983 Tom Bianchi carried an SX-70 through his summers in Fire Island Pines and photographed his friends, lovers, houses and decks: the euphoric years between Stonewall and AIDS. Damiani published this selection in 2013, edited by Ben Smales with an introduction by Edmund White, who calls the photographs at once formal and intimate.

The camera matters. Instant and private, the Polaroid needed no laboratory, so gay men could photograph their own lives without a witness, and its small square prints have the intimacy of a family album. Many of the men in these pictures died in the epidemic that followed, and the book is both a record of a community at ease and a measure of what was lost.