The Paris Review showcases various photos from PRIDE, along with a brief introduction.

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a flash point in the struggle for queer and trans rights. To commemorate the occasion, OR Books has reissued Fred W. McDarrah’s long out-of-print Pride: Photographs after Stonewall, an essential collection of images by the Village Voice’s first staff photographer and picture editor. In McDarrah’s work, we see the nascent stages of a movement that’s still making strides to this day. There is pain—an Act-Up demonstrator getting dragged away by cops in riot gear—but also triumph and joy: men kissing in Central Park, silhouettes slinking toward waterfront bars, the Gay Men’s Chorus singing, smiling, looking dashing in their matching tuxedos.

View the featured photos here.

Kyle Almond writes about Fred W. McDarrah’s PRIDE! for CNN

Soon after the riots broke out, McDarrah was there to document the LGBTQ community as it stood up to say enough was enough.

“Fred saw it all and recorded it all: the young queer people who were tired of being told that their way of being was obscene, that the families they’d made were twisted, all those folks who had been told year after year and all their lives that they were wrong,” Hilton Als wrote in a new foreword for McDarrah’s book “Pride: Photographs After Stonewall.”

McDarrah died in 2007 after working at The Village Voice for more than 50 years. He made his name by chronicling the Beat Generation and the counterculture movement in New York City. But his extensive work on the Pride movement lives on: through his book — recently updated for Stonewall’s 50th anniversary — and an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.

Read the full interactive post here.

Karen Schechner reviews PRIDE and interviews John Oakes for Kirkus Reviews

Pride, published by OR Books to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, is a new edition of Gay Pride: Photographs From Stonewall to Today, published 25 years ago. “We completely reset the original edition,” says John Oakes, the editor of the 2019 edition and co-publisher of OR Books. “We added 26 photos and took out a bunch that weren’t related to the New York City scene. We also came up with a new cover and a foreword by Hilton Als, who got his first job thanks to Fred. (We of course kept the original essays by Allen Ginsberg and Jill Johnston.)” I recently asked Oakes about the new edition and McDarrah’s work.

KAREN SCHECHNER: Where did Fred W. McDarrah’s photos first appear, and what was the public’s response?

JOHN OAKES: Many of his photos appeared in the Village Voice, where he was senior staff photographer and the paper’s first photo editor. The Voice was a tabloid, and Fred’s pictures were often used to document the city’s thriving alternative nightlife as well as provide evidence of alternative lifestyles. The Voice catered to a bohemian, sophisticated readership that reveled in their own exploits and those of their friends and neighbors.

SCHECHNER: How would you describe his photographic style, and what ideas did he capture in his work?

OAKES: More than anyone else, Fred W. McDarrah’s work recalls that of Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Like Weegee, McDarrah was a master of street photography—the sudden insight, the lightning-quick glimpse of another world.

Read the full review here.

Hilton Als reviews PRIDE by Fred W. McDarrah for The New Yorker

Part of Fred’s drive—isn’t it everyone’s?—was to provide for his children; work meant family and safety. Another thing that I found interesting in many of Fred’s pictures, before and after he started a family with his wife, Gloria, is how interested he was in New York’s improvised families, how we Manhattanites take up with one another and forge living and uncomfortable bonds that last for a night or forever. I think those alliances are at the heart of Fred’s pictures of gay life in the city’s pre- and post-Stonewall days, when things were on the verge of change. And they did change, and of course Fred was there, at the very start of a movement that became a movement when queer people were pushed to the wall that historic night on Christopher Street. Fred saw it all and recorded it all: the young queer people who were tired of being told that their way of being was obscene, that the families they’d made were twisted, all those folks who had been told year after year all their lives that they were wrong.

The Stonewall—the safety of a gay bar—was a small thing to ask, having come up with no safety at all, and I wonder if Fred—because of his upbringing—understood that. He must have, because he was always drawn to people who didn’t have a lot but made a lot with what they had. His portrait of Candy Darling, the trans performer, is one of the greatest comments we have not only on transformation but on stillness—a moment of reflection during an era when change, not stillness, was the point. I think I first saw Fred’s pictures of Manhattan’s gay denizens—the protesters fighting for change, fighting to be themselves—at the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, on Christopher Street. That store is gone now, but it stood for so much during its time: another place of safety, filled with information about who we were, and who we would be.

Read the full review here.

The New York Times featured an article on a collection of modern LGBTQ, including PRIDE, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion.

The black-and-white images somehow feel more resonant today than ever before . . . McDarrah was one of the only photographers to capture the immediate aftermath of that now legendary weekend, from the smashed jukeboxes and graffiti-scrawled windows to the slightly stunned and celebratory crowd . . . McDarrah continued to document New York’s often-overlooked L.G.B.T.Q. community until the 1990s, and his full body of work is interspersed throughout the book with poignant quotes from the subjects pictured.

Read the full article here.