At home portraits of John Waters, Todd Oldham, Ross Bleckner, Tommy Tune, Joel Schumacher, George Takei, Carson Kressley, Simon Doonan, Barney Frank, John Ashbery, Don Bachardy, Ned Rorem, Junior Vasquez, Michael Cunningham, Edward Albee, Charles Busch, David Del Tredici, Edmund White, John Bartlett and others.

“Refreshing clarity and modesty.”
– The New Yorker

“Marvelous photographs that capture our idiosyncrasies and obsessions.”
– Tony Kushner

“Vivid portraits... flying in the face of stereotypes.”
– The San Francisco Chronicle

“The most rounded photographic record we have ever had of the gay urban experience.”
– Charles Kaiser

“Rare, capricious moments that shimmer with emotion and intimacy.”
– Publishers Weekly

“Irony… curiosity and wonderment… It’s clear Atwood is passionate about his subjects,
and he showcases each with the greatest of care and the highest regard.”
– Wired Magazine

“Lush, lively evocations of creative living at its most humorous and engaged... This book is guaranteed to open your eyes and at the very least, it will inspire you to hire an interior decorator.”
– New York Magazine

“A modern day Gainsborough.”
– Genre Magazine

NEW YORK, NY – “Nothing provides insight into an individual’s personality as clearly as their home and how they live in it. In many ways, your home is an extension of yourself,” explains award-winning photographer Tom Atwood. This belief lays the foundation for Atwood’s first book, Kings in Their Castles. With 71 portraits of artists and activists, poets and personal trainers, directors and drag queens, Atwood’s work gets to the heart of the imagination, energy and eccentricity that characterizes the contributions of gay men to the world’s greatest cities.

The project has been a four-year labor of love for Atwood. “The photographs represent thoughts I’ve wanted to write, images I’ve wanted to paint, and individuals I’m delighted to count as part of my life,” he explains. Charles Kaiser, celebrated journalist and author of The Gay Metropolis, provides the book’s foreword. Kaiser heralds the book as a new touchstone of gay culture, joining the ranks of “everything from the rhythms of West Side Story to the short stories of The New Yorker, the epiphanies of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the plots of Edmund White.”

Offering a window into the lives and homes of some of the most intriguing characters in America, Kings in Their Castles depicts whimsical, intimate moments of daily life that shift between the pictorial and the theatrical. Atwood’s photographs run the gamut from the witty – artist Ross Bleckner yawning in his studio; filmmaker John Waters packing fake food into a suitcase; and DJ Junior Vasquez sweeping garbage – to the contemplative, with playwright Edward Albee musing at the piano; and author Michael Cunningham biting a nail, deep in thought.

With a flair for design, the subjects have crafted alternately playful, elegant and outlandish homes. “I am fascinated by spaces packed wall-to-wall with paraphernalia and detail,” says Atwood. Drag queen Hedda Lettuce fends off her pooch in front of a superb wig collection; writer Andrew Solomon takes a nap in a bedroom straight from a cubist painting; and Barneys creative director Simon Doonan works aside sleek iBook and miscellaneous ceramic busts. The spaces span the expansive – Broadway star Tommy Tune on his terrace against the Manhattan skyline; and Gucci architect Bill Sofield sprawling across his carpet – to the miniscule, with designer Todd Oldham climbing the ladder of his tree house; and sculptor Tobi Wong in his eight-foot by nine-foot apartment.

Atwood shoots primarily on 35 mm film and crops as little as possible. He is meticulous about composition. Using a wide depth of field to include both subjects and their surroundings, Atwood emphasizes that the two are a unified fabric. Neither subject nor apartment predominates; the photographs are an attempt to balance the two. Despite that most subjects do not look at the camera, the photographs are intimate, and viewers are able to relate emotionally. What results are fine art prints are rich in beauty, grace and clarity.

Prominent photographer Arthur Tress agrees: “With acute sensitivity . . . Tom Atwood penetrates secret lairs - private worlds of inner fantasy and escape, spheres of intimate delight and inventive décor - resulting in brilliantly-constructed stages displaying uninhibited flights of imaginative fantasy.”

A stylish, square-shaped book, Kings in Their Castles will find a place on the shelves of photography enthusiasts, would-be interior designers, and anyone interested in contemporary urban culture.

Title: Kings in Their Castles
Author: Tom Atwood
Publisher: Terrace Books
Format: Cloth hardcover
Price: $35
ISBN: 0-299-21150-9

What gay men do best is to create beauty. We know that from the melodies of Leonard Bernstein’s songs, the shape of Michael Cunningham’s sentences, the movements of Jerome Robbins’ ballets, the cadences of John Ashbery’s poetry, and the courage of Paul Cadmus’ paintings.

The eagerness of our embrace of the beautiful is one of the splendid things that sets us apart. To be gay is to be different; the enlightened among us recognize from an early age that this is an advantage, rather than a jinx.

Tom Atwood’s odyssey toward artistry (and difference) started when he was five years old, when he began visiting his relatives in Manhattan. It was love at first sight. Atwood’s infatuation with the greatest of all gay metropolises has only deepened with age. When he moved here in his twenties, he “instantly felt at home. It’s a part of me, and it always will be.”

This superb collection of photographs is the fruit of that life-long love affair, a vivid exploration of the gay heart of New York. One of the things that makes Atwood’s approach to his subject so unusual is his conviction that gay men are actually more interesting with their clothes on, ensconced in their own carefully constructed spaces. His journey toward photography developed out of a confluence of other interests, including painting, architecture, musical theater and psychology. The result is the most-rounded photographic record we have ever had of the gay urban experience.

This book should find a special place on the list of all the inventions that have long drawn gay men from the heartland into New York – everything from the rhythms of West Side Story to the short stories of the New Yorker, the epiphanies of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the plots of Edmund White. These pictures encapsulate all the possibilities of Manhattan living. They suggest, correctly, that gay men with ambition are more likely than the average New Yorker to have apartments with high ceilings, curving balconies and spectacular views. Their restless search for beauty has been incorporated into their daily lives. Implicit here are all the gifts that big city living can bestow, including privacy, eccentric company, and, most importantly, the freedom to create.

Atwood’s open personality and his almost courtly approach to his subjects invariably sets them at ease; then he puts them to work. That can be especially difficult when he encounters someone like Pascal Arnaud on September 11th, gazing at the incinerated towers of the World Trade Center, but even that catastrophe is easily incorporated into the artist’s vision of the invincible city.

He is a full-service impresario, offering his subjects make-up and styling – and doing all of it himself. Atwood sometimes assembles his shots: he believes he has just as much right to arrange his subjects as a painter or a sculptor. The point of his work is not to imitate life, but to clarify it, by making it more vivid. With very little distance between his own life and his photography, his ideas bubble up from the subconscious, offering him directions but no conclusions.

His pictures are a balance of formal grace and spontaneity. Look at the gaze of Michael Cunningham’s psychiatrist boyfriend, suggesting an Indian scout still deciphering the personality of his longtime companion, or Chris Beane reveling in a little role-reversal, striking a pose for a fellow photographer. Tim Bellavia offers an improbably seductive embrace of a Singer sewing machine, while Hush McDowell playfully mimics the posture of his dog.

Atwood crops his shots as little as possible. He likes strong lighting that produces a heightened, Technicolor effect, striking but never cold. Each picture includes as much of the subject’s environment as possible, yet nothing feels crowded or forced. Floors and ceilings (especially the decorated ones) sometimes reveal as much about his subjects as their expressions. Manhattan’s azure sky peaks in over many of his subjects, making the city a character in these photographs, and bathing its citizens in its most cheerful light.

While some of these apartments have a spare elegance, most are crammed with objects, like Chuck Hettinger’s porcelain poodles (to keep the real one company), Simon Doonan’s busts, John Waters’ snapshots, Mark Vitulano’s crosses, or Tom O’Horgan’s musical instruments. Jonathan Katz gazes at reams of gay history, all distilled on thousands of index cards, while Hedda Lettuce holds court beneath a multitude of wigs. In front of someone else’s lens, objects like Austin Chin’s pink flamingoes might have suggested clichés, but this photographer’s approach makes the final work feel more complex than its parts.

Like many of the artists in this volume, Atwood strives for something polished, graceful and beautiful, always looking for patterns within the chaos of Manhattan. Combining elements of reality and fantasy, he “bears witness to splendor” whenever he can.

Edmund White and his apple are perfectly balanced by book cases crammed with manuscripts, with coarse white light streaming in behind him from a Chelsea street. Tommy Tune presides over the Manhattan skyline, a sprawling dandy in white. Artists, architects, art dealers, archivists, dance essayists, bankers and writers; White House staffers, store owners, window dressers, movie directors, personal trainers and interior decorators; documentarians, painters, pianists, professors – Atwood has found a way to celebrate them all.

For gay kids everywhere, still longing to learn how to transform their difference into a blessing, the answers are all in these pages.

Gay men take great pride in cities. We congregate in the most beautiful of cities – New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Amsterdam. We would gladly trade half of even the smallest apartments to live in more interesting neighborhoods. And it is no secret that we are urban pioneers, the first to appreciate undiscovered neighborhoods. Our arrival often precedes a wave of cafés, bookstores, galleries and in time, straight style-watchers.

Similarly, we take great pride in our living spaces. With a flair for design, we craft playful, often outlandish homes. Our apartments follow fashion – brushed steel instead of marble, neopolitan martinis in lieu of beer – and flee from it, with fine antiques balancing disposable kitsch. For a community that is obsessed with image and beauty, our living spaces are the ultimate in self-expression. The gay man’s home is an extension of himself.

There is a profound need for a photo documentary of the gay male community that downplays flesh and zeroes in on the complicated, multi-dimensional personalities of its members. Given how urban and urbane we are, why is it that most gay photography books depict nudes in the wilderness? Kings in Their Castles responds to this need by documenting gay men at home in New York. In this first in a projected series of books, I offer a window into the lives and apartments of some of the most intriguing personalities in the city. Alongside the bankers, media professionals and architects, I document a breed of urban bohemians, beatniks, mavericks and iconoclasts that seems to be slowly disappearing. Greater acceptance and assimilation, while clearly a desired shift, entails its own kind of loss.

The personalities and interiors of Kings in Their Castles lend themselves well to color portrayal and so I describe them with the full color palate. My intention is to produce fine art prints rich in beauty and clarity. But I attempt to distinguish Kings in Their Castles from other photography series in a number of aspects. I often seek out apartments packed with wall-to-wall belongings, paraphernalia and detail. I attempt to suggest what such spaces reveal about the range of gay New Yorkers’ personalities as well as how complex our personalities can be. Similarly, to illustrate that subjects and environments are a unified fabric – that gay men construct self-images through decorating – I choose a wide depth of field. Neither subject nor apartment predominates; my images are an attempt to balance the two. Conventional portraiture, on the other hand, tends to emphasize the person, through backgrounds of streamlined simplicity often with a narrow depth of field.

To fully create 360-degree portraits, I attempt to photograph people in daily activity – modern day tableaux vivants. I seek out whimsical, intimate moments of daily life with subjects unaware of the camera. I strive for photographs that shift between the pictorial and the theatrical and that have elements of both formal portraiture and informal snapshots. I disclose, however, that many of my shots are staged. Just as an artist has free reign over his canvas or a playwright dictates the set and blocking on her stage, I suggest poses and occasionally rearrange subject matter as long as such adjustments reflect reality and remain true to the way that subjects live in their apartments.

Finding and photographing individuals for Kings in Their Castles became a psychological addiction of mine for four years – something that I felt compelled to find time for despite a busy work schedule. Most subjects came through referrals from friends or friends of friends. Yet some of the most interesting subjects emerged from some of the most unlikely sources: an elderly woman next to me on a plane, a don from Cambridge University, an Afrikaner management consultant, an LA high school student, a magazine editor from a dinner party in Paris and a government bureaucrat in Amsterdam who had never set foot in America.

The subjects in Kings in Their Castles are admittedly by no means a representative social or ethnic cross section of gay New York. The book is less a cultural ethnography than a miscellaneous catalogue of personalities and living spaces. Yet the armchair anthropologist in me can’t help sharing some broad observations about gay New York. Perhaps as a way to compensate for a society that would like to convince us of our inadequacies, we aspire to be different, larger than life and to succeed, often immodestly. One of the ways we construct aspirational self-images is through visual accoutrements. This might explain why disproportionate numbers of gay men take an interest in clothes and beautiful living spaces. As collectors, we are as proud of our ignoble objects as we are of the finest Wedgwood. And it is true: queers have bathroom cabinets stocked with cologne, moisturizers, exfoliants and even mascara. We also love gaudy Greek statues, Broadway musical paraphernalia and CDs of Cher.

Many of these observations should be apparent in the photographs in Kings in Their Castles. They act as a catalyst in this self-expression, permitting subjects to be the aspirational exhibitionists they are. Equally telling were some subjects that unfortunately could not fit in the book: Carson Kressley from ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’, sitting on his toilet; Charles Nolan & Andy Tobias, Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, drinking by their Christmas tree; restaurant owner Florent, framed by walls scribbled with Keith Haring graffiti remaining from a party; cannibal Tobias Schneebaum, organizing human skulls amongst a jungle of plants; Alan Rohwer, PR consultant for Versace and Madonna, sifting through the world’s largest collection of Madonna magazine covers; Christie’s creative director Ray Kurdziel, lounging in an impeccably tasteful parlor; Yale Review editor J. D. McClatchy, beside his towering two-story bookshelves; his partner, Chip Kidd, swamped by one of the world’s largest Batman and Robin paraphernalia collections; John Waters, sifting through old movie props in his attic, adjacent to his terrorist anthrax art installation; artist Barton Benes, organizing his daily medicine; editor Michael Denneny, smoking out his window while eyeing buffs at Crunch Fitness; Todd Oldham, pinning chromolithographs of moles on a painting of an old white man; and female impersonator Tish, videotaping passers-by from his Village apartment. Others sadly missing are subjects for whom scheduling proved too difficult: Choreographer Merce Cunningham; CBS Reporter Troy Roberts; Randy Jones, the Cowboy from the Village People; poet Ed Field; writer Terrence McNally; and Vogue editor Hamish Bowles.

Collectively, the subjects, expressions and interiors that comprise Kings in Their Castles constitute an autobiography of sorts. They represent thoughts I’ve wanted to write, images I’ve wanted to paint and individuals I’m delighted to count as part of my life. I hope that you find the sum of these photographs both powerful and beautiful and that they arouse in you as much delight and curiosity as they do in me.