About

While Ellis´ and Frame´s works are intimate, silent hymns to New York subcultures of the 1980s – a time of sexual freedom and the "anything-goes" lifestyle before the AIDS crisis – Josefsohns images, in particular the ones from the 1990s for the music channel MTV, gained wider attention and helped shape the public perception of the time in Germany.

Ellis's fragile black and white images reflect his struggles with his own identity and history, and the challenges of being an openly gay, black artist in 1980s New York. Allen Frame's colour works follow a strong documentary …