David Armstrong Contacts

David Armstrong (1954–2014) trained at the Massachusetts College of Art in the 1970s, part of the Boston cohort that included Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and Jack Pierson. Armstrong was the quietest of them. His large-format platinum prints and Cibachromes had been shown in galleries, but little of his working material had reached print before this book.

Organised and edited by the David Armstrong Archive alongside Kunsthalle Zürich and LUMA Arles, this is the first posthumous catalogue of Armstrong's work. Its 286 images, reproduced at a strict 1:1 scale, come from contact prints made between 1974 and 1994. The subjects are the ones you would expect if you know the period: Goldin, Cookie Mueller, Greer Lankton, Gary Indiana, Christopher Wool, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Teri Toye, Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian), Johnny Thunders. Provincetown summers, Boston studios, downtown Manhattan apartments. The 1:1 scale makes the original negative feel physically present in the book's pages: what you see is not the finished, selected image but the shoot as it happened.

Published to accompany exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2024 and LUMA Arles in 2025, the book was produced by MACK in London with an essay by Colleen Doyle of the David Armstrong Archive. The linen binding with a tipped-in image is typical of MACK's better production. At 30 × 30cm square and 320 pages, it holds its subject without dressing it up.

The book suits readers already engaged with the New York underground of the 1980s, anyone who found Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and wants to understand the wider milieu, or people who find finished monographs over-edited. It will frustrate anyone expecting the polished retrospective that Armstrong's most celebrated work might seem to warrant. GQ described the collection as capturing "both Armstrong's social circle and a wider portrait of New York in that era." That is accurate, if partial. The milieu is inseparable from the person in it.