“This exhibition and the history behind it and the history in front of it is about the history of the United States as much as it is about the history of the LGBTQ+ community,” said Marilyn Satin Kushner, the exhibit’s curator and the head of the New-York Historical Society’s department of prints, photographs and architectural collections.McDarrah, a Brooklyn native and World War II veteran, started at the Village Voice in the late 1950s selling ad space and taking occasional photographs. He became the paper’s primary photojournalist in 1964, when Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the artistic and cultural community — and arguably the unofficial headquarters of the country’s nascent gay rights movement.
“He was always tuned in to what was happening in the Village, but then that expanded to all of New York,” Kushner said. “He really personified the Village in New York, and he was here at the right time, and he knew a lot of these people — this was his world.”
While Greenwich Village may have been McDarrah’s world, the gay community was not his community — but he was able to build a rapport with front-line activists.
“He was trusted, and that’s an important part,” Kushner said when asked how McDarrah was able to secure a front-row seat to historic milestones like the Mattachine Society’s 1966 “sip-in” protest at Julius’ bar and New York City’s first gay pride march.
The late writer Allen Ginsberg, who was openly gay and was photographed several times by McDarrah, said the photographer “paid humble attention year after year to his beat” and described him as a “curious intersection of journeymen journalist & cultural archivist.”
“Though not gay, a hard-laboring family man himself, he’s made photo records of gay parades for decades — sign of a real artist’s inquisitive sympathy, intelligent democracy,” Ginsberg, who died in 1997, wrote of McDarrah in an essay.
McDarrah was also always around the Greenwich Village neighborhood, which helped.
“It makes sense that he was able to capture a lot of those photographs before Stonewall and makes sense that he was in the Village the night of Stonewall, and therefore was one of the few photographers who were there,” Kushner explained. “It makes sense that he would know the people here and then know what was going on afterwards and know when there were going to be marches and who was involved in the marches.”
McDarrah also knew personally and photographed some of the era’s most iconic queer creatives, including artist Andy Warhol, performer Candy Darling and writers James Baldwin and Susan Sontag.
“He used to take his kids to the Factory, to Andy Warhol’s Factory, and they’d babysit for him,” Kushner added.
McDarrah’s body of work went far beyond the LGBTQ community. He photographed a number of other social justice movements, including marches for women’s rights, Vietnam War protests and the 1963 March on Washington. His camera has also captured photos of some of the most famous politicians, entertainers and businessmen of his time, including Robert F. Kennedy, Bob Dylan and Donald Trump. He’s also known for photographing many of the most important Beat Generation writers, including Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs (in 1996, McDarrah and his wife, Gloria, published a book highlighting some of these photographs: “Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village”).
An important thing to note about McDarrah — who received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from New York University in 1954 — is that he saw himself strictly as a photojournalist and a documentarian, not an art photographer, according to Kushner.
“He seldom cropped his photographs, because he said what he photographed, he wanted the whole thing to be shown, and he didn’t want it to be a fine-art photograph.”
