{{Short description|American photographer (1939–2002)}} {{Use mdy dates|date=January 2026}} {{Infobox person | name = Robert Giard | image = Robert Giard.jpg | birth_date = July 22, 1939 | birth_place = United States | death_date = {{death date and age|2002|07|16|1939|07|22}} | death_place = United States | occupation = Photographer }}
'''Robert Giard''' (July 22, 1939 – July 16, 2002) was an American portrait, landscape, and figure photographer.<ref name=":1">{{Cite news |date=2002-07-26 |title=Robert Giard, 62, a Portraitist of Gay Writers |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/26/arts/robert-giard-62-a-portraitist-of-gay-writers.html |access-date=2025-05-18 |work=The New York Times |language=en-US |issn=0362-4331}}</ref>
==Early life== Giard was a native of Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in a working-class household.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last=Ellenzweig |first=Allen |date=January–February 2003 |title=Robert Giard: Portrait of a Photographer |url=https://glreview.org/article/robert-giard-portrait-of-a-photographer/ |journal=The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide |volume=10 |issue=1}}</ref> He majored in English literature and received a B.A. from Yale University in 1961, then an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Boston University in 1965. For a time, he taught intermediate grades at the New Lincoln School.<ref name=":2">{{Cite web |last= |title=About Robert Giard |url=https://robertgiardfoundation.org/about-robert-giard/ |access-date=2025-05-18 |website=Robert Giard Foundation |language=en-US}}</ref>
==Career== By 1972, he began as a photographer, concentrating on landscapes of the South Fork of Long Island, portraits of friends, many of them artists and writers in the region, and the nude figure.<ref name=":1" /> In the beginning years of his career, Giard did much of his landscape photography during the late autumn, winter, and early spring when many of the fashionable houses of the Hamptons were boarded up for the season.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Giard |first=Robert |title=Landscapes |url=https://robertgiardfoundation.org/portfolio-items/landscapes/ |access-date=2025-05-18 |website=Robert Giard Foundation |language=en-US}}</ref>
Giard continued photographing nudes, still lives, and landscapes throughout the rest of his career. The vast majority of Giard's photography was on black-and-white film. He used a twin-lens reflex Rolleicord camera on a tripod and did not use artificial lights. By the late 1970s, he started to teach photography at Southampton Community College.<ref name=":3">{{Cite web |last=Goldberg |first=Ariel |last2=Parness |first2=Noam |title=Buffering the Lens |url=https://www.leslielohman.org/archive/buffering-the-lens |access-date=2025-05-18 |website=Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art |language=en}}</ref>
=== ''Particular Voices'' === Ultimately, it would be in the area of the formal portrait that Giard's career made its most indelible mark. In 1985, Giard saw performances of two plays dealing with the AIDS crisis: Larry Kramer's ''The Normal Heart'' and William Hoffman's ''As Is.'' Giard felt compelled to photograph gay and lesbian writers in the face of death and societal oppression.<ref name=":3" /> He wanted to establish their literary history and cultural identity for the broader American public, which had refused to acknowledge either.<ref name=":4">{{Cite web |date=2018-12-14 |title=Robert Giard Photographs |url=https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/robert-giard-photographs |access-date=2025-05-18 |website=Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library |language=en}}</ref>
He documented queer figures in straightforward, unadorned, yet sometimes witty and playful portraits, focusing on a wide survey of significant gay and lesbian literary lights.<ref>Beller, Peter C. (13 March 2005). "PHOTOGRAPHY: Portraits of the Gay Literary Life". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 July 2013.</ref> The photos were taken in a wide variety of poses and settings, and often included people and pets who were close to the subjects.<ref name=":0" /> While some photographs were simple enough to be used as headshots for the artists, others revealed their homes or studios and highlighted important objects to them. Jameson Fitzpatrick, reviewing for ''Art in America,'' describes Giard's gaze as "dignifying and tender...what unifies Giard's portraits–single, double, and group alike–is his almost beatific vision: the silver way light graces skin."<ref name=":5">{{Cite web |last=Fitzpatrick |first=Jameson |date=2020-04-28 |title=In Tender, Dignifying Portraits, Photographer Robert Giard Insisted That Gay and Lesbian Culture Was Worthy of Documentation |url=https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/robert-giard-uncanny-effects-currents-connection-leslie-lohman-museum-1202685001/ |access-date=2025-05-18 |website=Art in America |language=en-US}}</ref>
By the time of his death, Giard had documented over 600 queer writers in this project. The majority of his subjects were white, but a significant number were writers of color. Although this project was initially named for its focus on gay and lesbian writers, it included some bisexual and trans writers as well.<ref name=":5" /> By the late 1990s, Giard relabeled the project as focusing on queer writers.<ref name=":3" /> Authors came from a variety of genres and popularity levels. He found subjects via a network of introductions, including referrals from the writers he had already photographed, until he was meeting artists well outside his original network.<ref name=":5" /> His portraits included such iconic figures as Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich, as well as emerging novelists making their first mark, including Sapphire, David Leavitt, Shay Youngblood, and Michael Cunningham. A selection of these portraits, culled from the five hundred examples he had by then already amassed, was published by MIT Press in 1997 as the anthology ''Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers'', which then served as the companion volume to the New York Public Library's 1998 exhibition of the same name.<ref>Giard, Robert. "Particular Voices Robert Giard's Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers: the New York Public Library, Center for the Humanities, Third Floor Galleries, April 18-June 27, 1998". New York Public Library. Retrieved 16 July 2013.</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Soller |first1=Kurt |title=T Suggests: A Rediscovered Funk Record, a New Gallery Upstate and More |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/t-magazine/t-suggests-robert-giard-ice-house-gallery.html |website=The New York Times |access-date=June 27, 2022 |date=July 12, 2019}}</ref> The published anthology of ''Particular Voices'' won a Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Photography/Art Book in 1997.<ref name=":2" />
Giard did much of his work by hand: carefully selecting the paper for prints, hand-printing in a small home studio, and spotting the works by hand to finish them. Before arriving at a writer's home to take their portrait, he would read their works.<ref name=":0" /> He then wrote them a letter to introduce himself, starting a correspondence about the authors' current works, whether they'd like to use his photos for their headshots, and whether Giard could exhibit their photos.<ref name=":3" /> Then he would eventually call them over the phone to arrange portraiture details, and finally travel to meet them for the image.<ref name=":5" /> Later, Giard added place-focused photography to his mission of documenting gay and lesbian writers. These locations included Oscar Wilde's tomb and various gay bars in San Francisco.<ref name=":1" />
=== Later projects === In one final unfinished project, Giard was working on a portrait documentation of the grant recipients of the Thanks Be To Grandmother Winifred Foundation. Until 2001, the foundation supported projects by women 54 years and older that benefited other mature women. Grants supported research and artistic projects, as well as efforts to alleviate social, economic, and medical problems for women in a given locality. The foundation benefited 321 grant recipients from around the country and Giard, traveling the country by train, bus, and plane (he never had a driver's license) succeeded in photographing 241 of the women grantees by the time of his death. He kept a journal of his travels and documented his many visits to a richly diverse group of American women in small towns and major cities.<ref name=":6">{{Cite web |last= |title=The Grandmother Winifred Portraits |url=https://robertgiardfoundation.org/portfolio-items/the-grandmother-winifred-portraits/ |access-date=2025-05-18 |website=Robert Giard Foundation |language=en-US}}</ref>
''Queer Views'' was another final unfinished project: a series on early queer activists. Giard explicitly names trans activists as within its scope.<ref name=":6" /> He intended the series to focus on portraiture and important geographic locations, modulated by his own writings.<ref name=":3" />
== Personal life and death == In 1974, Giard settled in Amagansett, Long Island, with his life partner, Jonathan Silin, an early childhood educator, where they remained for nearly thirty years until Giard's death.<ref name=":2" /> In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he participated in local organizing via the mixed-gender East End Gay Organization.<ref name=":3" />
Giard died on July 16, 2002, at age 62. He was traveling from Minneapolis to Chicago by bus for a portrait session and apparently had a heart attack.<ref name=":1" />
==Legacy== During his lifetime, Giard's work had been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, earning awards and grants.<ref name=":2" />
Some of his photographs are now in the collections of Brooklyn Museum, San Francisco Public Library, New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress. A complete archive of his work, journals, and ephemera is at the American Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.<ref name=":2" /> Jonathan Silin, Giard's life partner, donated the materials to the Beinecke.<ref name=":4" />
The Robert Giard Foundation was formed in 2002 with the aim of preserving his photographic legacy, promoting his work for educational purposes, and encouraging young photographers.<ref>{{Cite web |last= |title=About the Robert Giard Foundation |url=https://robertgiardfoundation.org/about-foundation/ |access-date=2025-05-18 |website=Robert Giard Foundation |language=en-US}}</ref> The annual Robert Giard Fellowship is a $10,000 grant to visual artists whose work addresses sexuality, gender, and issues of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity.<ref>{{cite web |title=Annie Flanagan Wins Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers |url=https://www.artforum.com/news/annie-flanagan-wins-robert-giard-grant-for-emerging-lgbtq-photographers-83614 |website=Art Forum |access-date=June 27, 2022 |date=July 23, 2020}}</ref>
==References== {{Reflist}}
==External links== * Robert Giard Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. * [https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97517895/ "Larry Kramer and Molly, NYC" Portrait, Library of Congress] * [http://sflib1.sfpl.org/record=b1773463~S1 Robert Giard Photographs Collection, San Francisco Public Library] * [https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/artists/7186/Robert_Giard Robert Giard Holdings, Brooklyn Museum] * [http://www.lambdaliterary.org/winners-finalists/07/14/lambda-literary-awards-1997/ 10th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Homepage] * [https://www.robertgiardfoundation.org The Robert Giard Foundation] {{authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Giard, Robert}} Category:1939 births Category:2002 deaths Category:American LGBTQ photographers Category:American gay artists Category:American portrait photographers Category:Artists from Hartford, Connecticut Category:People from Amagansett, New York Category:Photographers from Connecticut Category:Photographers from New York (state) Category:20th-century American photographers Category:Yale University alumni Category:Boston University College of Arts and Sciences alumni Category:20th-century American LGBTQ people