i am Kiam

Sep. 28, 2012 at 9:51am with 8 notes

Doug Ischar
Selections from the Marginal Waters series, 1985

“It was a real delight to be in an environment where people were so uninhibited,” Ischar says. “I never saw any penetration there, but you saw everything and you saw a lot of it. There was such a wide range of types and ethnicities and classes, and there was never any friction. It was really a wonderfully tranquil place. The Rocks were probably the most central and visible gay beach in North America. This was right smack on Lake Shore Drive; you couldn’t miss this place.”

The phrase marginal waters, a naval term referring to waters off the coast of a country that remain outside its jurisdiction, here serves as a metaphor for a marginalized subculture. Ischar’s sun-drenched images strikingly depict a community at rest during a period of unrest. In the face of a devastating epidemic and a conservative regime, the mere act of sunbathing becomes one of defiance. “Understand that from the get-go I was photographing gay men almost out of a sense of desperation because of AIDS,” Ischar says. “I was fearful AIDS would obliterate queer culture. I had this fervid conservationist mission.”

(see more of the series here)