Gail Thacker

NLE Lab Gathering Place

• Tabboo! On a Motorcycle (2007)
  665 positive negative Polaroid film, scanned and printed as a digital C print
  20 x 24 in.

Gail Thacker’s photographs convey the rich history of counter-cultural movements, performance art, and resistance to oppression in Greenwich Village. Her subject Tabboo! Is well known in the Village’s underground scene. He performs in drag, creates plays and paints, and appeared in the film Wigstock.

• Kenny Kenny with Spotlight (2010)
  665 positive negative Polaroid film, scanned and printed as a digital C print
  20 x 24 in.
• Below 14th St. above 6th, 1 & 2 (2008)
  Positive negative Polaroid distressed negatives printed on color fuji paper
  16 x 20 in.

Thacker’s polaroid portraits of her friends, objects and the streets of New York City became a platform into which she explored the abstraction of the passing of time. Kenny Kenny is active in New York City’s LGBT night life at clubs such as the Limelight. Her cityscapes capture the mercurial state of the Village’s seemingly iconic streets. The Polaroid negatives for these photographs were put under conditions of deterioration, then printed.

The resulting graininess, distortion, and varied sepia tones of these images evoke a cultural era as fleeting as some of the old photographic techniques used to create them.