Paul Smith Show

Paul Smith’s “Ashes” (1984) in the show “The Human Curve.”Credit...Paul Smith and Daniel Cooney Fine Art

This article was written for the New York Times.

Through Dec. 19. Daniel Cooney Fine Art, 508 W. 26th St., Suite 9C, Manhattan; 212-255-8158, danielcooneyfineart.com.

From 1984 to 1987, using a homemade pinhole camera and paper negatives, Paul Smith photographed rubble-strewn streets and outdoor gay sex in his Lower East Side neighborhood. By extending the exposure time to three minutes and curving the film plane, he created hallucinatory images that feel more like a shadowy collective memory than documents of a historic time and place. A critic and curator as well as an artist, Mr. Smith exhibited at all of the now fabled East Village galleries of the time. In these little known pictures, which are presented here under the title “The Human Curve,” everything is in focus, but what is closest to the aperture looms freakishly large, and the lengthened exposures produce blurring and graininess in moving bodies.

Mr. Smith took numerous pictures on the roof of his apartment building, which was dominated by a pair of phallic exhaust pipes, posing his friends as they engaged in sunbathing or sex. In one, a naked man’s long arm with exaggerated fingers stretches toward an ashtray. A second one depicts two shirtless men, one standing on the roof edge, the other sitting propped up against the back of the cornice, viewed through the curving frame of sunglasses, while a streetscape of derelict buildings (the subject of other pictures) lies below. Some prints in the show were mounted to curved metal supports, but the images are more effective straight up. They are ghostly emanations, from a place and a culture that was about to be destroyed by AIDS and gentrification.

ARTHUR LUBOW