NYAB Event - Josef Astor “Displaced Persons”

Josef Astor “Displaced Persons”

Participant Inc.

This event has ended.

Josef Astor’s images capture the space between moments, a difficult and penetrating stasis. The portraits selected for Displaced Persons are multifaceted, unnerving, and surreal. Staging and photographing his peers and muses, Astor intuitively documented key players from intersecting pre-millennial and pre-Internet dance and late-night performance subcultures, assembling a constellation of artists and hybrids who took it upon themselves to reflect a largely oblivious world back onto itself with venomous innocence and shocking self-possession. Astor, in all his subtlety, is one of those hybrids.

—Antony, Josef Astor and the Terrible Pall of Stillness

PARTICIPANT INC presents Josef Astor, Displaced Persons, a solo exhibition of photographs, curated by the artist’s longtime friend and subject, Antony. Best known for his decades of work as a photographer for Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and other media outlets, Astor’s exhibition features twenty-four works made outside the commercial realm: largely unpublished photographs
of artists and performers who subverted the stereotype and the artifice of the icon in

Whether a studio portrait or a screen projection tableau, displaced refers to the physical outsidedness and anti-establishments these artist-subjects created, operated within, and, most importantly, made visible and public. Offering a rare opportunity to see Astor’s experimental work, the exhibition foregrounds conceptions of community that value the uncommon; and subjects who authored alternative contexts, depicted here not only as subject matter, but also as testament to Astor’s category-defying collaborations with friends and fellow artists.