David Armstrong: Portraits Artists Space New York – Paul Carter Robinson

David Armstrong died in Los Angeles in 2014 at the age of sixty, leaving behind a body of work that has taken time to receive the sustained critical attention it deserves. This exhibition at Artists Space, the first comprehensive survey of his photography in the United States, brings together over 90 photographs made over three decades and makes a persuasive case that Armstrong was considerably more than the sum of his associations. He is often framed in context to Nan Goldin, with whom he shared his first exhibition in 1977 and a long creative kinship, and to the Boston School more broadly. The exhibition does not ignore those connections, but it shifts the emphasis toward what Armstrong was actually doing with a camera across thirty years of sustained, restless inquiry.

He began in the late 1970s with raw black-and-white portraits of the people around him in New York. Cookie Mueller, Patti Astor, Rene Ricard, Johnny Thunders, Nan Goldin herself, and a wider circle of artists, musicians and self-invented figures who inhabited the city’s downtown in its most unglamorous and electric years.

The photographs are technically precise and formally considered, but what gives them their power is a quality of stillness that seems remarkable given the circumstances they document. These were people living at the edges of everything, in a city that was broke, dangerous, and teeming with creative energy, and Armstrong photographed them with a tenderness that never tipped into sentiment.

The AIDS epidemic took a devastating toll on those communities, and what happened to Armstrong’s work in its aftermath is one of the most interesting things about his practice. He turned away from portraiture and toward landscape and still life, beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s. These pictures should be understood in relation to that loss. He photographed cityscapes, country gardens, formal topiary, and statuary, but he did so out of focus, producing lushly saturated Cibachromes and C-prints in which legibility is deliberately frustrated. The images are depopulated but not empty. Light, shadow and atmosphere do the work that human figures might otherwise perform. Armstrong described the effect as “not of this world,” a state of being simultaneously rooted in a place and unmoored from it. Seen in the context of who had died and what had been lost, these blurred landscapes read as memento mori, meditations on absence using the vocabulary of presence.

The exhibition traces the next shift in his practice with equal attentiveness. In the early 2000s, Armstrong moved into a rambling brownstone on Jefferson Avenue in Brooklyn that served as a home, a studio, and a kind of permanent installation. Friends and muses lived there. Other photographers rented the space for its interiors, which Armstrong had built up through a combination of deliberate construction and slow accumulation. Fashion editorial work brought him back to photographing people within those rooms, and what followed was among the most formally ambitious work of his career.

He studied the history of painting, particularly sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance portraiture and seventeenth-century Dutch still life. He applied what he found there to photography. His subjects, predominantly men, were bathed in natural light within settings of casual erudition that made them genuinely difficult to place in time. The photographs do not feel contemporary, but neither do they feel historical. They occupy a different kind of time altogether, one governed by mood and light rather than period or style.

Armstrong then complicated matters further by moving to digital processes, which enabled rapid work and direct manipulation of the image. His final body of work took this to its logical conclusion. He printed photographs, arranged them into installation-like collages, and rephotographed the results, collapsing depth of field and deliberately confusing any stable sense of what was being depicted. The work folds back on itself, using his own images as raw material for further experimentation. It is a portrait of a practice examining itself, and it is some of the most formally inventive work in the show.

Co-organised by Artists Space Executive Director Jay Sanders and Deputy Director Kelly Taxter, in close collaboration with the David Armstrong Archive, the exhibition is structured to trace this progression without turning it into a simple linear narrative. The sequencing respects the complexity of how one phase of Armstrong’s practice fed into and complicated the next. It gives the blurry landscape work the space it needs to register fully, which requires a certain patience from the viewer. These are not pictures that yield their meaning immediately, and the exhibition is to its credit for not rushing past them.

Armstrong studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, moved to New York in 1977, and showed early work in New York/New Wave at P.S. 1 in 1981 and in the landmark Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space in 1989, curated by Goldin. Scalo Verlag Zürich published three volumes of his photographs across the 1990s and early 2000s, and a major retrospective travelled from Kunsthalle Zürich to LUMA Arles, where it ran until March of this year. The Mack publication David Armstrong Contacts, drawing on previously unpublished contact sheets from 1974 to 1994, appeared in 2025.

What this exhibition makes clear is that Armstrong was not simply a chronicler of a particular time and place, though he was that too, and brilliantly. He was an artist who spent his entire working life testing what a photograph can hold, how presence is constructed or withheld, and how intimacy survives the act of looking. The full measure of that project is still coming into view.

David Armstrong: Portraits is at Artists Space, New York, until 23 May.

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