Center for Photography at Woodstock Presents the Exhibition “Pride and Protest: Photographs by Fred W. McDarrah”

Kingston, NY, May 10, 2024–The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Pride and Protest: Photographs by Fred W. McDarrah. Curated by prominent photography critic and author Vince Aletti, the exhibition traces the history of gay and lesbian visibility and civil rights protests in New York City from 1959 to 1993. The exhibition will open at CPW on Saturday, June 1, the first day of Pride Month, and will continue through September 1, 2024; a reception for Pride and Protest will take place on June 1 from 5–7 PM at CPW, 474 Broadway, Kingston.

Pride and Protest represents a view of gay cultural life and the gay rights movement in New York City, from the period before the 1969 Stonewall Uprising and continuing through activist protests around the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Longtime Greenwich Village photographer Fred W. McDarrah (1926–2007) was the first picture editor and staff photographer for the legendary New York City newspaper The Village Voice. His book The Artist’s World in Pictures, coauthored with Thomas B. Hess, documents the New York art world during the late 1950s. The earliest of the exhibition’s 61 works are portraits of renowned poets Frank O’Hara in 1959, and W.H. Auden in 1966. One of McDarrah’s most famous images captures the exhilaration and determination of the young rebels who instigated the Stonewall rebellion on June 28, 1969, a turning point in the struggle for gay rights. Included in the exhibition are pictures of protests, marches, and key figures of the gay rights movement in all its contentious and celebratory public display. 

Contemporaneous portraits of queer authors, artists, and performers–including Andy Warhol, playwright Larry Kramer, Susan Sontag, Tennessee Williams, and Village Voice dance critic and Ms. magazine writer Jill Johnston–surround the march images and suggest some of the ways mainstream culture had already diverged from the straight and narrow. The exhibition’s most recent image is from 1993, a portrait of Johnston and Ingrid Nyeboe standing together in front of a brownstone. Interestingly, the abolition of legal constraints against private, consenting same-sex sexual conduct between adults went through in the 1980 case New York v. Onofre. New York has provided benefits to same-sex partners of state employees since 1995, leading up to 2011 when the state finally passed a law allowing same-sex marriages.

Pride and Protest is curated by Vince Aletti from the Fred W. McDarrah Archive held by MUUS Collection. It was first presented by MUUS Collection at Paris Photo in November, 2023; after CPW, the exhibition will travel to the New-York Historical Society in January, 2025. The exhibition is accompanied by a newsprint publication with a text by Aletti. 

About the Center for Photography at Woodstock
Founded in 1977, the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is a not-for-profit arts organization with a two-fold mission: to support artists working in photography and related media; and to engage audiences through creation, discovery, and learning. At the heart of CPW’s mission is programming that is community-based, artist-centered, and collaborative. To foster public conversation around critical issues in photography, CPW provides exhibitions, workshops, artists’ residencies, and access to a digital media lab. In 2022, CPW relocated from Woodstock to 474 Broadway in Kingston. Last year, the non-profit acquired a 40,000-square-foot former cigar factory at 25 Dederick Street in Kingston, which is being renovated by Lopergolo + Bartling architects as CPW’s future headquarters, a photography museum, educational and community center.

About MUUS Collection
MUUS Collection brings together photographic works that mark major turning points in American history, ultimately creating a road map of our shared past. As a functional archive, the MUUS Collection builds, preserves, studies, and shares its outstanding collections of American photography, generating new scholarship and understanding, while instigating interesting and relevant dialogues within the wider photography community.

Press images and interview requests
To request high resolution images for press reproduction and interviews, please click here, or contact CPW here.

Photo: Fred W. McDarrah, Craig Rodwell, founder, Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, New York, New York, October 14, 1969. Courtesy of and copyright MUUS Collection.