Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 31, 2006|Volume 34, Number 24

Library acquires archive of
photographer Robert Giard

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has acquired the archive of American photographer Robert Giard (B.A. 1961) as part of the Yale Collection of American Literature.

The archive was acquired from Jonathan Silin, Robert Giard's life partner.

In 1971, having earned degrees in literature at both Yale and Boston University and working as a teacher, Giard began his professional career as a self-taught photographer of landscapes and male nudes. In 1985, the self-styled "archivist" and "preservationist" became an itinerant portraitist of gay and lesbian American writers.

In the midst of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Giard -- inspired partially by the play "The Normal Heart" by another Yale alumnus, Larry Kramer (B.A. 1957) -- said he felt compelled to document the phenomenon of gay and lesbian letters in America through photographic portraiture. He embarked upon a pilgrimage to the homes of gay and lesbian writers throughout the United States that ended only with his death in 2002 while traveling to Chicago by bus.

His stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers.

In 1997 the MIT Press published "Particular Voices," a collection featuring over 150 of Giard's portraits alongside excerpts from the subjects' writings. The collection includes such individuals as Allen Ginsberg, Quentin Crisp, Larry Kramer, Doris Grumbach, Kate Millett and Sapphire, as well as Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award laureates Michael Cunningham, Edward Albee, Terrence McNally and Tony Kushner.

After completing "Particular Voices," Giard began another long portrait project, that of photographing beneficiaries of the Thanks Be to Grandmother Winifred Foundation. The foundation provides funding for women over 54 "to create, and manifest into reality, ideas and concepts that will improve the lives of women." Giard's resulting book, "Grandmother Winifred Journals, 1996-2002," was published posthumously by Crones' Cradle Conserve Press in 2005. These portraits are also present in the archive.

In his own musings on his portraits, recorded in various interviews, Giard described them as both historical record and aesthetic object, as simultaneously evidentiary and expressive.

Writing in "Particular Voices," Giard said: "Portraiture is all about paying attention to the present. ... I've made this record with an eye to the future. Photography is par excellence a medium expressive of our mortality, holding up, as it does, one time for the contemplation of another time. This motif infuses all portrait photography with a special poignancy. It is my wish that tomorrow, when a viewer looks into the eyes of the subjects of these pictures, he or she will say in a spirit of wonder, 'These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed.' So too will the portraits and the words which accompanied them respond, 'We were here; we existed. This is how we were.'"

Giard also maintained that portraits as an art form often reveal as much about the portraitist as about the subject.

The photographer's archive contains more than 1,500 vintage prints, chiefly 16 x 20 inches, and 7,800 related work prints, most 8 x 10 inches, as well as extensive correspondence, records, diaries and other papers. Notable in the diaries is Giard's careful record of his trips to photograph his subjects, with notes on their interactions with him. One series of notebooks describes his printing process in elaborate detail, portrait by portrait.

Yale is committed to the advancement of gay and lesbian studies through the Larry Kramer Initiative, and Giard's archive complements the Beinecke's expanding collection of resources related to contemporary gay and lesbian literature, which includes the papers of James Purdy, Edmund White, Robert Farro, David Leavitt, Felice Picano and Ethan Mordden, in addition to correspondence of such figures as Edward Albee and Christopher Isherwood contained in other archives.

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