James Bidgood (filmmaker) - Life and Career

Life and Career

His artistic output has embraced a number of media and disciplines, including music, set and window design, and drag performance. In time his interests led him to photography and film and it is for this work that he is most widely known. Highly recognizable, his photographs are distinguished by an aesthetic of high fantasy and camp. His work which was inspired by an early interest in Florenz Ziegfeld, Folies Bergère, and George Quaintance has, in turn, served as important inspiration for a slew of artists including Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle. In the late 1950s Bidgood attended Parsons The New School for Design.

Bidgood released the film Pink Narcissus in 1971, after filming in his small apartment from 1963 to 1970. The film is a dialogue-free fantasy centered around a young and often naked man. The film took seven years to make, and Bidgood built all the sets and filmed the entire piece in his tiny apartment. He later removed his name from the film because he felt editors had changed his original vision. Consequently, the film bore the word "Anonymous" for the director's credit, and it was misattributed to other directors such as Andy Warhol for many years. Pink Narcissus was re-released in 2003 by Strand Releasing.

Bigood's oeuvre is characterized by a heavy reliance on invention. His photographs feature elaborate sets built ground up from the materials of the theatre, fashion, design, and fine art. In a profile of the artist published in Aperture, Philip Gefter writes,

Necessity was the mother of invention for Bidgood, who created elaborate photographic tableaux in his small midtown Manhattan studio apartment. His first erotic series was an underwater epic called Water Colors, made in the early 1960s, in which he used a dancer from Club 82 named Jay Garvin as his subject. The underwater atmosphere is completely fabricated; the bottom of the ocean was created with silver lame spread across the floor of Bidgood's apartment; he made the arch of a cave out of waxed paper, and fashioned red lame into the shape of lobster. He coated Garvin with mineral oil and pasted glitter and sequins to his skin so the silver fabric under photographic lights would reflect on his body like water. For weeks at a time, Bigood would eat and sleep within the sets he constructed in his apartment.

Many contemporary themes are found even in the earliest of Bidgood's work. Camp, identity, erotics and desire, marginality, and performance all figure heavily in his portraits of nude men. Bidgood's complex references to the theatre and performance seem to presage Queer articulations of Performance. His techniques, working processes, and masterful use of illusionistic color indicate both a mature understanding of his influences and goals and an important contrast to the art movements of the time the work was first created.

In 2005, James Bidgood was honored with a Creative Capital grant which facilitated a return to art photography after a hiatus of nearly 40 years. His current projects include work for Christian Louboutin and Out magazine. In 1999 Taschen published a monograph of his work including biographical images and stills from his film. The art book publisher Taschen included an interview with Bidgood in its 2008 publication The Big Penis Book, and will re-publish his monograph in 2009. His most recent work was featured in Out in February 2009.

Bidgood is represented by ClampArt in New York City as well as Larry Collins Fine Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Read more about this topic:  James Bidgood (filmmaker)

Famous quotes containing the words life and/or career:

    In everyone there sleeps
    A sense of life lived according to love.
    To some it means the difference they could make
    By loving others, but across most it sweeps
    As all they might have done had they been loved.
    That nothing cures.
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

    He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)