In 2009, the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, curated by Nan Goldin, the guest artistic director that year, introduced the people of Arles, in an exhibition hosted at the Parc des Ateliers, to the universe of David Armstrong. Fiteen years later, his work is returning to Arles through this new exhibition. More than a simple portraitist, Armstrong, who died in 2014, captured the essence of a generation and a particular attitude in the face of life, which he immortalized in a series of images as intimate as they are striking. From the beginning of his career, Armstrong set out to photograph the times he was living in and his friends. 

In the 1970s, while studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he got to know NanGoldin,MarkMorrisroe,Taboo!andJack Pierson, forming an avant-garde artistic scene. His first black- and-white photographs portray a young generation that is both introspective and rebellious, embodying a fragile and magnetic kind of freedom. His work is a veritable document of an era, an archive that exudes beauty, that of a New York that no longer exists. New York as attitude, above and beyond the Empire State Building, postcards, the many scenes from films shot in its frenetic streets, and its giant advertisements. His New York is a promise, a refuge for the dispossessed, for artists, poets, musicians and misfi ts of all kinds. The exhibition shows how, from the outset, Armstrong depicted not only people, but also an attitude in the face of life and its disappointments– an attitude that is at once heady and exuberant, disenchanted and idle. Even today, these portraits possess a striking candor: there is no filter, no lying, these men and women confronted the lens with a seductive and free eye. 

His hazy landscapes form a counterpoint to these portraits and are much more timeless. Armstrong immortalized the places that he visited during the twists and turns of his life, panoramic views that he seems to have captured on the fly. He took them at the end of the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was at its peak. They should be seen through the prism of this huge tragedy: they are memento mori. These works recall the fleeting nature of life. 

With this large exhibition, LUMA Arles celebrates once again David Armstrong’s singular vision, his melancholic aesthetic, as well as his enduring influence on contemporary photography. It is an immersion in the work of an artist who, above and beyond the portrait, was able to capture an entire era and a state of mind on glossy paper.