From 1974 to 1980, American photographer Bobby Busnach transformed a crumbling Upper West Side apartment into a theatrical stage, capturing hundreds of photographs of his family of friends. With dramatic lighting, cinematic angles, and a mix of vintage and contemporary fashions, he meticulously styled, made-up, and posed his subjects, creating portraits that explored shifting personalities and identities. The images present the home as a queer, transgressive and transformative space of communion, celebration and strife. A place where a group of fierce friends, runaways and wannabe stars came together to play out their fantasies of fame through photography. The resulting images are both staged and startingly intimate; they speak to the fluid boundaries between art and life, performance and identity – capturing not only how these figures wanted to be seen, but also how they saw each other. The archive resurfaces today as both a tribute to, and testament of, an intense creative bond—loving, complex and volatile—between the artist and his closest collaborator and best friend, Geraldine Visco. Their artistic partnership produced some of the archive’s most striking images, and as its protagonist, Visco’s presence animates the work throughout. Organised and edited by Seana Redmond, the book brings together over a hundred never-before-seen photographs from an archive that remained largely unseen for decades, establishing this publication as the very first reference on Busnach’s work. Texts written by Amelia Abraham and Jackson Davidow offer contemporary and critical reflections on iconic imagery and queer domestic nightlife. All of Us Stars is a tale of re-invention and performance, disguise and theatricality, of chosen kinship, precarity and survival: an enigmatic tribute to forgotten lives that burned bright on the margins of fame.
