More Glitter—Less Bitter

Squint your eyes; make everything sparkle. On view at Electric Works, Daniel Nicoletta’s photographs are almost pure theater. Silver balloons float in space; a baby green lamb smiles; throngs of drunken, frenzied fags parade with a naked girl around shadowy summer streets; drag queens, high and coated in pearls and white silken gowns, laugh out loud in populated restaurants—this is theater. This is San Francisco as captured by Nicoletta.

Nicoletta’s photographs cover political theater, too. He shot nearly every famous photograph of Harvey Milk. The photographer worked in Milk’s camera store in the 1970s, and was involved in Milk’s political campaigns, including his successful election in 1977. In “Harvey Milk running towards supporters that were gathered in front of his Castro Street Camera Store on the night of his victorious election to the SF Board of Supervisors as an openly gay candidate, November 8, 1977” (1977), Nicoletta captures a moment in history that very few of us ever get to see. Here is a truly joyous man, the newly elected Milk; he runs, arms outstretched as if to hug someone off camera, laughing, caught in the moment of celebrating the fulfillment of a dream.

But theater is not all excess. It provides us with more sobering moments, too. Next to this victory photograph, almost unsuitably, a lone photograph is on view. “Harvey Milk’s Suit, July 26, 1995” (1995) pictures Milk’s suit, laid out to be shot again. The suit is soaked in the blood that has stained it for more than twenty-five years.

“Juanita More, Hair by Brent Haas, Styling by Todd Hartnett, Couture by Mr. David, October 8, 1996,” 1996; archival pigment print, 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Electric Works, San Francisco.

Milk lives throughout Nicoletta’s exhibition. An entire wall is devoted to documenting the making of Gus Van Sant’s Academy Award–winning Milk (2008). It is bizarre to see so many of the actual players of that time—the time when Milk was alive—posing side by side with the people playing them.

The exhibition is replete with Nicoletta’s newer and less iconic photographs. “Juanita More, Hair by Brent Haas, Styling by Todd Hartnett, Couture by Mr. David, October 8, 1996” (1996) and “Radical Faerie tea party—Jack Davis’ Birthday, September 26, 2009” (2009) show us that theater has moved indoors. It has become something specialized that requires makeup artists and cliques; it poses no threat to the political theater of the streets, despite the Day-Glo pomp-and-circumstance conspicuousness that dominates its show-and-don’t-touch aesthetic. Thankfully, this century is still young.

“More Glitter—Less Bitter” is on view at Electric Works in San Francisco through July 10, 2010.

Steven Trull is a writer whose work has appeared in Everyday Genius, NOO Journal, Sententia, and is forthcoming in PANK 5 and Stymie Magazine.