Photography

As a lonely teenager in 1950’s Chicago, artist Lee Brozgol discovered the camera as a way to both dissapear behind a lens, as well as intimately observe the world and people around him.

Initially interested in filmmaking, Brozgol was drawn to photography and cinema as a means to “create beautiful illusions.” The escapist movie musicals he saw at the faded Art Deco movie palaces off Lake Michigan were a balm for an awkward kid with an unhappy home life.

The call of art and glamour drew Brozgol to New York in the 1960’s, and though his creative journey became focused on more fine art, Brozgol always photographed and lovingly documented the city and people around him through iconic eras of NYC history, constantly evolving.

During the 1970’s, between his two marriages to women, artist Lee Brozgol took his camera with him as he explored NYC’s Christopher Street Piers, downtown Manhattan, and his own queerness.

Between 1971 and 1983 the sprawling ruins of the piers were an artistic and hedonistic free zone where artists, queer people, gay men and street culture mixed. The rough walls of the pier terminals became stunning murals by artists such as Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz, who sent out an open invitation for an “artists invasion” of Pier 34 in 1983 and declared “This is the real MoMA.”

Artist Lee Brozgol was drawn to the piers both as a creative center and a place to explore his bisexuality through the voyeuristic lens of his camera. 

Brozgol documented important artworks of the time, including original pieces by Keith Haring against a wall tapestried by green decay, as well as the site of David Wojnarowicz’s seminal piece “Arthur Rimbaud in New York.” 

Demolished in the mid 1980’s, the Christopher Street Piers, despite their derelict and often dangerous nature, also provided a safe haven for many marginalized queer youths of color, as well as trans people who were discriminated against and shut out of mainstream queer spaces.

This organic and free atmosphere inspired a generation of artists to create work outside the boxes of society or art institutions, and euphorically celebrate identity, painting their ruins into a castle.

In the early 1980’s, after meeting his second wife and life-partner, artist Lee Brozgol relocated to New York’s Lower East Side, and roamed the streets with his camera. 

The uniquely gritty downtown landscape inspired Brozgol deeply, and impacted his creative work for the rest of his life.

Brozgol wrote of his Lower East Side beginnings:

“In the early 1980’s, this wasteland was bounded by Forsyth on the west; Allen on the east; Stanton on the north and Delancey Street on the south. At the turn of the 20th Century, this narrow eight block stretch had been among the most populous in the world, spilling over with the raucous lives of thousands of immigrant Jews crammed into hastily built tenements.” 

“Now all that stood were a few structures—a settlement house, an abandoned grammar school, a Nazarene church holding services in what had once been a public library, a smattering of shops along Delancey including a decrepit Spanish-language movie theater and, one touch of grace, a squatter’s garden.”

“The few tenements that remained had cinder blocks where there had been doors and windows. Otherwise, the landscape was cluttered by the debris of fallen buildings. The citizenry inhabiting this forlorn territory were drug dealers, junkies, sex workers, their John’s and the homeless.”

“Their usual silence would be broken by the cries of a dealer shouting the latest code word for heroin. Then, from seemingly nowhere, hordes of specters would suddenly materialize, make their score; then just as quickly, return to invisibility.”

“It was like taking a stroll through a sunny meadow in anticipation of better days, and not knowing you were in a field of land mines.”

These select posthumously recovered photographs by Brozgol are a beautiful time capsule into an iconic era of CIty history. 

All photographs by Lee Brozgol, Christopher Street Piers, Spring Street Piers, Lower East Side, NYC ca. 1977-1983