Many of us in the South Florida LGBT community regularly commute every summer to the very tip of Cape Cod which has always been considered a little piece of heaven on earth. For those who have never ventured to this far part of Massachusetts, there is a new Exhibition opening at the Stonewall National Museum that will explain in part why Provincetown has been a gay destination for decades now.
Photographer Al Kaplan was just 18 years old when he first arrived in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod and fell in love with the town as much as the young men who inhabited part of it. For the next five summers he was never without his camera and his record of what was considered the gay counter culture is even more remarkable for the fact that he captured it all as an insider. He photographed not just the celebrity figures that have always been part of the landscape in P Town, but also candid and intimate everyday moments of a community that even in this liberated town was still on the receiving end of a lot of police harassment.
In 1966 Kaplan moved to Miami and became a celebrated photographer until his death in 2009. However it wasn’t until last year that his body of work from the 1960’s started getting the recognition it deserved with an Exhibition in P Town itself in conjunction with a new book titled There Was Always A Place to Crash : Al Kaplan’s Provincetown 1961 – 1966 edited by journalist Brett Sokol.
Now a small part of Kaplan’s photographs will be shown in a new Exhibit ‘The Lure of Provincetown’ at the Stonewall National Museum from Friday December 16th util January 29th 2017.
Alongside Kaplan’s work will be photographs by Midge Battelle who documented P Town’s Womensweek ‘Dyke Drag Brunch’ from 1995 – 1998, and paintings of the town’s gay lifestyle by Len Paoletti whose work has often been considered ‘controversial’.
The Lure Of Provincetown : Stonewall National Museum
December 16th 2016 – January 29th 2017
Information : http://www.stonewall-museum.org/
Labels: 2016, art, culture, exhibition, photography, Provincetown Culture
