Mark Morrisroe, "Jonathan (Jack Pierson)," 1982, Chromogenic print, 20 x 16 inches (sheet), 15 x 15 inches (image), Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City © Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection), Fotomuseum Winterthur
Mark Morrisroe, "Untitled (Self Portrait)," 1988, Photogram (Unique), 14 x 11 inches, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City © Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection), Fotomuseum Winterthur
Mark Morrisroe, "Untitled (Jonathan Pierson)," 1978, Polaroid print (Unique), 3.75 x 3.75 inches, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City © Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection), Fotomuseum Winterthur
Monograph: Mark Morrisroe (Twin Palms Publishers)Photographs +Text by Mark Morrisroe, 200 plates
"It kills me to look at my old photographs of myself and my friends. We were such beautiful, sexy kids but we always felt bad because we thought we were ugly at the time. It was because we were such outcasts in high school and so unpopular. We believed what other people said. If any one of us could have seen how attractive we really were we might have made something better of our lives. I'm the only guy that I know who wanted to runaway to be a prostitute."– Mark Morrisroe
+ + +
Mark Morrisroe studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he became life long friends with Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Davis Armstrong and Jack Pierson, now collectively called "The Boston School." He died in 1999.
+ + +
Nan Goldin wrote: "Mark was an outlaw on every front-sexually, socially and artistically. He was marked by his dramatic and violent adolescence as a teenage prostitute with a deep distrust and a fierce sense of his uniqueness. I met him in Art School in 1977; he left shit in my mailbox as a gesture of friendship. Limping wildly down the halls in his torn t-shirts, calling himself Mark Dirt, he was Boston's first punk. He developed into a photographer with a completely distinctive artistic vision and signature. Both his pictures of his lovers, close friends, and objects of desire, and his touching still lifes stand as timeless fragments of his life, resonating with sexual longing, loneliness, and loss."
+ + +
