For Gary Lee Boas, the Glamour of Celebrity Will Never Diminish

Gary Lee Boas started taking photographs when he was 14 after Miss Universe visited his Pennsylvania hometown. Captivated by the ripples of excitement she sent through his staid local community, Boas bought a basic Brownie camera and began his lifelong hobby as a chronicler of celebrity. Though he’s since snapped everyone from David Bowie to Elizabeth Taylor, often by waiting patiently outside restaurants and stage doors in New York City, he still considers himself a fan with a camera. “The only term I reject is being called a member of the paparazzi,” he says. “Because usually they do or say something to get the celebrity fired up and provoke a negative reaction. I’m there with my camera because I want to meet that person, not provoke them.”

Since it was first published in 1999, Boas’ tome Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan has become a cult classic praised by A-list lensers including David LaChapelle, Annie Leibovitz and the late Herb Ritts. Boas’ personal archive now extends to over 200,000 photographs that alternate between old-school glamour – Marlene Dietrich alighting a taxi, Bianca Jagger shadowed by Andy Warhol – and something more subversive. His 2003 photobook Gary Lee Boas – New York Sex, 1979-1985 collects the cream of his imagery depicting sex workers and porn actors from a bygone era, long before OnlyFans. As a gay man who relished the sexual liberation of the city before it was decimated by HIV/AIDS, Boas drew no distinction between mainstream movie stars and adult film stars. They all capitalised on the inextricable link between sex appeal and celebrity. 

Now 75, Boas is playful, flirtatious, gossipy, ribald and twinkly. During a recent In Conversation event at the Tate Modern in London, which was hosted by art historian and curator Dominic Johnson, Boas gently resisted attempts to intellectualise his work. He preferred sharing anecdotes about Hollywood’s great and good, many of them unprintable, though he did lament the fact that his 2008 photobook Celebrity was printed on poorly chosen paper. “The publisher used [heavy-duty] construction-like paper which sopped up all the ink, so you couldn’t see anybody in the background at all,” Boas said. “And in my pictures taken in nightclubs, it’s the expressions on the faces of the background people that really make the image.”

When we meet a few days later at his publisher’s flat in east London, Boas is every bit as entertaining. In between sips of strong coffee, he shares salty stories from his ridiculously colourful life, which includes stints working at his local sex shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and the iconic New York nightclub Studio 54. “People like Liz [Taylor], Liza [Minnelli] and Halston would go there almost every night, so I became friends with them,” he says. “They always knew I’d help them out the back door and into a car [if] they were messed up on something.” Working at Studio 54 didn’t just break down barriers between Boas and the late-70s glitterati; it also shaped his moral code as a photographer. “If somebody is really fucked up [on drink or drugs], I don’t take a picture, because I just figure they’re having their moment of messiness,” he says. 

In a way, this mixture of respect and reverence captures the essence of Boas the photographer. Shot on the fly after hours waiting outside celebrity hangouts, his images of icons like Jane Fonda, Tina Turner and Elton John are thrillingly unfiltered, but they only peel back a layer or two of mystique. Boas is a fan of fabulosity who wishes today’s A-listers would serve full-on glamour like Joan Crawford and Audrey Hepburn. “When those women walked into a room, you felt it,” he says. “They didn’t have face work done, so you saw them age, but they maintained [their star quality] with the flair of their body movements and their outfits. You never saw them dressed down.” He singles out two contemporary stars who possess the same room-filling magnetism. “Charlize Theron is so damn beautiful that you couldn’t make her look rough if you tried,” he says. “And I’ve been in a room [photographing] Cate Blanchett five times and she’s always stunning. I like to think we have a rapport.” 

Boas is still booked and busy taking photographs. Every year, he does a six-week stint in New York catching as many Broadway shows as he can, then snapping the cast members at the stage door. He’s also working on a new book and hoping to mount the first London exhibition of his work since 2001. But above all, he remains a quintessential fan with a zest for documenting – and sometimes stepping into – the glamorous life. “People say, ‘Why don’t you settle down with someone your own age?’, but that would be like living in the day room at an old people’s home,” he quips. “And honey, I’m just not there yet.”