Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines

Photos courtesy D.A.P.

"After knocking on too many more locked doors, I put the photos away in a box. The Pines was ground zero as AIDS exploded about that time. That was 40 years ago. A horrific amount of the life recorded in my pictures was consumed in the chaos of the crisis within a few years. I could not have imagined then that my Polaroids would so suddenly become a record of a lost world--my box of pictures a mausoleum, too painful to visit. When I reopened the box decades later, I found friends and lovers playing and smiling. Alive again." --Tom Bianchi

Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines (Damiani) is out May 31.

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