Courtesy Estate of Fred W. McDarrah
As the photographer for the Village Voice, the only (somewhat) mainstream media outlet on Earth paying serious and respectful attention to gay issues and events in the 1960s and 1970s, Fred W. McDarrah amassed what is generally regarded as the largest collection of gay-themed documentary photos taken by one individual, ever.
Today, McDarrah images have become the signature photos of what is now inclusively referred to as LGBTQ+ history, and his photos were featured by the Barack Obama White House in the video announcing the Stonewall National Monument in 2016.
Born in Brooklyn, Fred W. McDarrah (1926–2007) bought his first camera at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. After leaving Boys High, he served as a US Army paratrooper in Occupied Japan at the end of World War II, camera usually in hand. He earned a Journalism degree from New York University on the G.I. Bill.
He began to photograph the artists, writers, musicians and bohemian types who frequented the bars, galleries and cafes in Greenwich Village not because he was assigned to, but because he wanted to document what he felt privileged to be a witness to.
When a neighbor told Fred he was starting a newspaper—the Voice—McDarrah signed on. He was associated with the paper for the rest of his life. He was the paper’s first picture editor, and, for decades, its only staff photographer.
McDarrah was the eyes of the Voice, the house organ of the postwar counterculture. His pictures were the graphic expression of the United States’ first, largest, and most spirited alternative weekly as it recorded—and helped create—the most vibrant decades of the greatest city in the world.
He covered New York City’s diverse downtown scenes, producing an unmatched and encyclopedic visual record of people, events, and movements, most of which were virtually ignored by the mass media at the time—including the nascent Women’s Rights and Civil Rights movements, anti–Vietnam War marches, the first Earth Day, Pop Art, Beat poetry, rock music, and experimental theater. And, of course, the rise of the modern day Gay Rights movement.
Over a dozen books of his photos have been published, and his work has been exhibited at hundreds of galleries and museums around the planet, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tibor de Nagy, New York; Pace, New York; and is in numerous private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of the City of New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Among other honors, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Press Club’s Page One award.