Danny Fitzgerald
American, 1921-2000
Danny, 1966
Silver gelatin print
Signed in pencil to verso along with estate stamp and signature for the Collection of Robert Loncar and James Kempster, as well as Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, NY label. Portrait of a man with viewer looking down a barrel of a gun. Unframed.

About the artist: Born in 1921, Fitzgerald did not seriously take up photography until he was in his thirties. He began by photographing the young aspiring bodybuilders he met at Abe Goldberg’s gym on the Lower East Side; a world away from the South Brooklyn streets of his own youth. A physically small and deeply private man, Fitzgerald would gain the confidence of his subjects by, in the words of Loncar and Kempster, “asking their assistance with his own workout or partnering with them for training. In the process he impressed them with his knowledge of worldly literature and culture, as well as his ingratiating encouragement of their physical beauty, and a ten, twenty or fifty-dollar bill slipped into the pocket of their chinos.”

His early photographs, processed, like much of his life, in private, were standard beefcake-esque compositions of his models in posing pouches and bikini trunks. He sold his work, covertly, to private collectors in a time when homosexual activity could land you between two and 10 years in jail. This cloud of “censure and secrecy” write Loncar and Kempster” would hang over his work the rest of his life.”
14 x 11 in. (35.56 x 27.94 cm.)