In the summer of 1984, photographer Arlene Gottfried met a man who called himself Midnight at a Lower East Side nightclub, where he was dancing. He invited her out the next night to see him perform before the live drums and poetry at Miguel Piñero’s Nuyorican Poets Café. The image she captured of him that night in a mask would become the first of hundreds of photos Gottfried would make of Midnight over the next two decades, in what amounted to a diary of his life and their complicated relationship.
Surrounded by Gottfried’s photographs in a Chelsea gallery, Midnight feels slightly overwhelmed. He loses his breath when he begins to recount the stories of many people who are gone. “It is very difficult,” he says, “because they were very close friends—Miguel and Arlene.”
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“I was about 25 years old at the time when Arlene came in and started snapping,” he recalls, “and that’s when I knew I was going to have a friend.” What captivated Gottfried is right there in the photos: an incredibly handsome, stylish, and sexually uninhibited man.
A date followed. “We made arrangements to meet the next day. She wanted me to see Shakespeare in Central Park. We got very close at that time. We went down to the lake, and we were kissing, and I told her I wanted to be her friend, and from that day on, we were, and she would take my picture.”
In September, Midnight moved in. “Arlene had a Rolodex, a million friends, and invites every night,” recalls Midnight. Gottfried was busy working on assignments for publications like The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, and LIFE. She tried training him as a photo assistant. “She would pay the rent, and I would pay for food, clean, run errands like, pick up cameras, film,” says Midnight.
“We were deep…
Source : time
