Robert Giard

Robert Giard was a portrait, landscape, and figure photographer who for two decades chronicled a broad survey of contemporary American gay and lesbian literary figures. He majored in English literature and received a B.A. from Yale, and M.A. in Comparative Literature from Boston University. By 1972, entirely self-taught, he began to photograph, concentrating on landscapes, portraits of friends, and the nude figure.In 1985, after seeing a performance of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart dealing...See more

Robert Giard was a portrait, landscape, and figure photographer who for two decades chronicled a broad survey of contemporary American gay and lesbian literary figures. He majored in English literature and received a B.A. from Yale, and M.A. in Comparative Literature from Boston University. By 1972, entirely self-taught, he began to photograph, concentrating on landscapes, portraits of friends, and the nude figure.In 1985, after seeing a performance of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart dealing with the crisis of AIDS in the gay community, Giard was moved by a sense of urgency. Synthesizing his life-long interest in literature and involvement in gay issues of the 1970s and 1980s, Giard set about documenting in straightforward, unadorned, yet sometimes witty and playful portraits, a wide survey of significant literary figures, as well as brash new writers on the scene. In his words: to record "something of note about our experience, our history, and our culture." A selection of these portraits was published by MIT Press in 1997 as the anthology Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers and was awarded a Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Photography/Art Book.Giard passed away, suddenly, from a heart attack in July, 2002. In 2004 the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University acquired the Giard Archive. See less