The Honickman Foundation

2012 CDS / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Winner

Gerard H. Gaskin
Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene

Gerard H. Gaskin has won the 2012 Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for his black-and-white and color photographs that document, as Gaskin writes, "the performative and aesthetic history of the African American and Latino house and ballroom community." Gaskin's work was selected from two hundred entries in the sixth biennial First Book Prize competition.

Renowned curator, historian, and photographer Deborah Willis judged the competition and chose Gaskin to win the prize. She said she found Gaskin's photographs "innovative and spirited," and the images filled with both hope and struggle as "they explore ideas of longing, beauty, and desire."

Deborah Willis wrote a foreword to the book, Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene, which was published in November 2013 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The collection of photographs made over a sixteen-year period is Gaskin's first book.

"The balls are a celebration of black and Latino urban gay life and were born in Harlem out of a need for black and Latino gays to have a safe space to express themselves," writes Gaskin. "Balls are constructed like beauty and talent pageants. The participants work to redefine and critique gender and sexual identity through an extravagant fashion masquerade. Women and men become fluid, interchangeable points of departure and reference, disrupting the notion of a fixed and rigid gender and sexual make-up. All of this happens at night in small halls in cities all over the country."

He continues, "These photographs, taken in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., show us different views of these spaces as they are reflected in the eyes of house and ball members who perform what they wish these cities could be. Balls have come a long way since their beginnings in Harlem; they have influenced popular culture through dance forms such as vogue and gained attention through documentary films like Paris Is Burning. My images try to show a personal and intimate beauty, pride, dignity, courage, and grace that have been painfully challenged by mainstream society."

Gerard H. Gaskin, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, earned a B.A. from Hunter College in 1994. As a freelance photographer based in Jersey City, New Jersey, his work has been widely published in such publications as the New York Times, Newsday, Black Enterprise, OneWorld, Teen People, Caribbean Beat, and DownBeat; other clientele include record companies Island, Sony, Def Jam, and Mercury. His work has also been included in the books Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers (2001) and New York: A State of Mind (2000).

Gaskin has received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, a Center for Photography at Woodstock artist residency, and a Queens Council on the Arts Individual Artists Initiative Award.

Gerard Gaskin's photographs have been seen in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and abroad, including the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum of Art, and Black Magic Woman Festival in Amsterdam. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of the City of New York and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others.

Gerard H. Gaskin's website

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