“Amputees, dwarves, drifters, and ‘street people’": photographer George Dureau dedicated his life to documenting New Orleans' underclass, with captivating results, as a new publication shows
The foreword to Aperture’s new book of portraits by George Dureau, written by Philip Gefter and informed by an endless range of material about the late photographer’s fascinating life, begins with a perfectly matched quotation from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. “I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself our guide,” Mann writes. It’s apt not least because it’s impossible to admire Dureau’s powerful photographs of disenfranchised African Americans – “amputees, dwarves, drifters, and ‘street people’,” in Gefter’s words – without lapsing into their erotic power, too. Beauty and sexuality are one here; Dureau’s subjects, men mostly, are flawed, honest, and present, and perhaps most importantly of all, unabashedly virile.
Born in New Orleans in 1930, Dureau’s life was that of an artist and a lover, riding through the bohemian streets of the French Quarter for beautiful and imperfect men to take home to sleep with and photograph, though not necessarily in that order. He believed passionately in his artistry as ‘a way of being’, placing his photographs and his relationships on a level playing field. “I’m the artist I grew up thinking an artist is supposed to be,” Gefter quotes. “I live a warm, involved, humanist sort of life. There are lots of people passing through it. I have exciting experiences and learn things about people. They always go into my art. I cannot have an experience and it not go into my art.”
As such, his photographs are sincere and engaged, taking the underclass of Louisiana society, or men with amputations and birth defects, and catapulting them to the status of Greek gods, equal parts ancient statue and homoerotica masquerading as a 1970s physique magazine. Over the course of his subversive career, Dureau distilled the libertarian lifestyle of late 20th-century New Orleans into portraiture, forming, along with Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar, a triumvirate of gay image-making, and normalizing homosexuality in the process.
The eponymous book – amazingly only the second to have been published of his work – places the very best of Dureau's history-making oeuvre in one prized tome, celebrating both his individual lifestyle and his powerful record of the tenderness and eroticism that pervaded his life. Overwhelmingly, it serves as a means of recording those who, all too often, are forgotten in history books. "It is Dureau's great accomplishment to render the individuals of his local community so worthy of history's attention," Gefter closes: "human, powerful, sexual, and humble, as if to say that figures of folklore, legend, and myth had been inspired from daily circumstance and human flesh, out of the palpable experience of daily life."
