Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines

"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--Editors "OUT Magazine" A collection of SX-70 Polaroids made between 1975 and 1983, 'Fire Island Pines' is a fraught and fascinating period piece: a dazzling view of Eden before the Fall.--Vince Aletti "TIME" Bianchi began documenting all aspects of life in the gay Pines enclave where he spent his summers-- the love, the partying, the natural splendor of the barrier island 60 miles east of the city, where a deep sense of community was availible to many who felt closeted or stifled in their everyday lives.--Kimberly Chou "The Wall Street Journal" Capturing his naked, frolicking friends.--Antwaun Sargent "The New York Times" For nearly a decade the lawyer-turner-photographer captured the hedonistic parties, the sun-kissed, chiseled bodies and sexually-charged experiementation of the storied weekend getaway. This summer a collecrtion of Bianchi's picturescelebrating the euphoric, anything-goes years preceding the AIDS epidemic has been published for the first time in a coffee table tome Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983.--Luigi Tadini "Paper Magazine" My first impression of Fire Island was, Oh my god, a magic place exists, for real - a place that I had dreamed about, says Bianchi, whose Polaroid photos of men frolicking at the Pines have become a poignant social document of gay life pre-AIDS. It was a place that gave birth to my soul as an artist, because I found myself in a community of enormously creative and supportive people who were saying, ' Yeah, go for it!' in ways that our families never could understand. For those born too late to experience that world, there is now Fire Island Pines, a handsome collection of Bianchi's photos that capture the sun, sex, and camaraderie of that lost era.--Michael Martin "OUT Magazine" This year, Fire Island's legendary enclave the Pines celebrates its 60th anniversary season, but its real heyday dates to the 1970s and early '80s, when fit young men started streaming into the area, earning the Pines its reputation as a sand-swept gay bacchanal. Tom Bianchi's Polaroids captured the liberated mood of those days, and they're now collected in a handsome book, "Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines" (Damiani).--Alex Hawgood "The New York Times: T Magazine" Unbridled hedonism, superlative beauty, endless sunshine. This is the world of Tom Bianchi's Fire Island Pines, a barrier island off the coast of Long Island, New York that has been a holiday haven for the gay community since the sixties.--Tish Wrigley "Another Magazine" The beautiful men who occupied those houses are the focus of another new book due to arrive this week: "Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983," by the photographer Tom Bianchi. For decades, the pictures in that book lay in boxes at the photographer's Palm Springs, Calif., residence; when he finally retrieved them, Mr. Bianchi explained last week, he was startled to discover a trove recording not merely hundreds of muscular bodies, but a record of a forgotten place and time. True, the images he created focus largely on buff young men disporting themselves. But they also capture something far less obvious: the exuberance of a culture in transformation, of a generation discovering itself in what Mr. Bianchi termed "a gay Brigadoon." "I was the young, lonely gay boy in the Midwest who had no idea paradise ex