Michael Alago: Memory Squared

There is, first, that hand-painted sign, “Take a look,” planted in the middle of the book like a wink. A few pages later, a plaster Hercules poses, chest puffed out, between two very real bodybuilders, tattooed to the neck. The joke is subtle, but it says everything: for this New York photographer, the antique and the trivial fight over the same white square.

Michael Alago did not come to photography through art school. Born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents, he grew up backstage at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City in the 1970s. In his twenties, he became one of rock’s most effective talent scouts: bubble baths with Nina Simone, signing Metallica to Elektra Records, late-night phone calls with Patti Smith, nights out with Lou Reed. New Orleans photographer George Dureau watched over those years as a mentor shared by Alago and Robert Mapplethorpe, as writer Jack Fritscher recalls in his introduction to the book.

Mapplethorpe, precisely. “I became a huge fan of Robert’s after buying the cover of Horses, Patti Smith’s album,” Alago says. “I loved that all his images were framed in a square, immaculate.” In 1983, Alago called Mapplethorpe’s studio to request a visit; a curt refusal, “that made me angry,” then a callback from the photographer himself a few days later. Alago came away with two prints in mind, Larry with 3 Fingers and Tiger Lily. The friendship lasted until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1988, through dinners at Vanessa’s, cab rides to the Red Parrot, and detours by the Mine Shaft.

The white border, precisely, became his signature. “In the 1970s and 1980s, I took snapshots with my plastic Kodak, often from the stage at a concert,” Alago explains. “I then bought a 35mm Minolta that I kept for years. Then the simplicity of the Polaroid won me over, and there it was: instant gratification.” He used it for more than a decade, before announcing, not without mischief, that he is heading to B&H Photo to buy the latest version of the camera.

What the city offered him then, he does not hide: “Grit, sex, and rock and roll. An X-rated movie house in Times Square or the Meatpacking District was always just around the corner. None of that exists anymore.” No app, no profile, just the nerve of a young man approaching a stranger on the street. “I never had trouble walking up to a good-looking man and asking if I could photograph him. I was young and charming, and most of the time they said yes.” Alago does not mince words.

Trick – Polaroid Encounters 1998-2009 © Michael Alago

Mitch – Polaroid Encounters 1998-2009 © Michael Alago

The off-duty lifeguard, the tattoo artist, the sailor on leave: the typology Alago assembles page after page reads like an alphabet of neighborhood virility, captured without hierarchy between the gym and the sidewalk. Some faces return from one chapter to the next, Herb, Massimo, Matt, like regulars found again at the bar; others leave only a scrawled first name and a white border, proof enough that they passed through.

This is, after all, a matter of obsession, and Jack Fritscher does not hide it either in his introductory text, where he invokes Warhol, Mapplethorpe, and Michelangelo in turn. He quotes theorist Camille Paglia, for whom gay men are “guardians of the masculine impulse,” and the stranger encountered by chance, a “wandering pagan god.” One might smile at the emphasis. Still: Alago’s 200 Polaroids, lit like the end of a long night, look less like a trophy collection than a diary of encounters kept freehand.

Alago collects as much as he photographs. “I collect photographs of men. Let’s keep it simple,” he says, before naming his loyalties: George Dureau, for the raw humanity he brings to amputees and hustlers in New Orleans, and Jack Pierson, intimate and melancholic, associated with the Boston school.

Polaroid Encounters follows Rough Gods, Brutal Truth, and Beautiful Imperfections. The author, sober since the 1980s, told his life story in I Am Michael Alago and in the documentary Who the F**k Is That Guy?. The book arrives with, on its back cover, a note from musician Sean Yseult of White Zombie that reads like a warning: shocking, sexy, rough, tough, and gorgeous, she admits, confessing that she had to look away at times. Take her word for it.

Polaroid Encounters 1998-2009, by Michael Alago, is published by Shining Life Press and available for $60.