Remembering David Armstrong

"I am sometimes acerbic at parties and can act like a gnarled old queen. I am loving living in Brooklyn, having served my time in Manhattan. An old boyfriend of mine called Manhattan a very expensive penal colony, and I think he was on to something. The best thing about what I do is that it’s the only thing that sustains me. I can kick and scream about it but it gives me a great deal of satisfaction.

My usual style is a calculated mess. I love beautiful clothes but I wear them as though they’ve been thrown on the floor. My style icon is Elizabeth Taylor. She just throws it all out there. And I really love how she becomes whoever she happens to be married to at the time. In bed I wear underwear. My bedroom is the hottest room in the house. This outfit makes me feel like wearing more suits. I’m working on pre-existing images of mine, and making books of people and periods of time."

People often talk about the light in David Armstrong’s photographs. He never used lamps, working instead with sunlight to illuminate the beautiful young men who populate his work. His was a rare and touching talent, and his death on Saturday evening has been met with enormous sadness.

Growing up with Nan Goldin, Armstrong was a key part of the so-called “Boston School” of photographers who included Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Jack Pierson. Theirs was a photography of intimacy and truth, chronicling their often dissolute lives first in Boston and then New York, and the lives of the freaks and outsiders who were their friends. This was the 80s – life on the peripheries was about druggies, drag queens, glamour, art, parties, AIDs and premature death, and Armstrong captured it all with a uniquely tender and poetic eye. In 2001, Hedi Slimane asked him to shoot backstage at a Dior catwalk show, pulling him into the spotlight of fashion and replacing his outsider subjects with male models. It was a new career, yet he never compromised his style – his fashion photography, for the likes of Another Man and Vogue Homme, retains the intimacy that radiates through all his work. “It’s almost like Vermeer,” Ryan McGinley once said. “His photographs are about desire and despair. These are qualities he looks for in the boys’ eyes.”

In memory of a prodigious photographer and wonderful man, AnOther looks back to a typically entertaining interview he did with Another Man S/S11, alongside a gallery of his luminous work for the magazine.

David Armstrong's last ever fashion story features in the latest issue of Another Man, out now.