Between 1974 and 1980, Bobby Busnach and Geraldine Visco played out their dreams of Hollywood glamour in uptown Manhattan. The pair had met at school in Massachusetts and moved to New York as teenagers with big ambitions – Busnach to be a photographer and DJ, Visco an actor. They found a cheap apartment in a once-lavish residential hotel on the Upper West Side, where Visco and friends on the New York gay scene would dress up in designer wear and pose for Busnach. One of their key inspirations was Marilyn Monroe.
Busnach was fascinated by the star: he had posters of Monroe on his walls and identified with her mixture of, as he later put it, “innocence and sensuality”. He encouraged Visco, in particular, to pose as Monroe during marathon, drug-fuelled photoshoots at their home, which were styled and directed by Busnach and paid for by Visco. The resulting images, though meticulously constructed, do not conceal their own artificiality. As Amelia Abraham writes in a new book of Busnach’s photographs, All of Us Stars, “they are studies, perhaps not of Hollywood glamour, but the illusion of it”.
Just as Monroe’s public image belied a troubled personal life, so too did these glittering evocations. Busnach and Visco both engaged in sex work amid the clamour of 1970s New York and, as time wore on, their friendship became increasingly fractious. “I let Bob get away with not working, not cleaning up and having temper tantrums because, unfortunately, I’d fallen in love with him, even though he was gay,” Visco wrote years later.
The dreams that brought the pair to New York never quite came to pass. Busnach stopped taking photos after Visco kicked him out in 1980 and his work was only recently rediscovered via Facebook. Visco ended up working as an administrator in the classics department at Columbia University, though she remained an enthusiastic club-goer into her sixties. Both have now passed away, but the work they made together decades ago, in all its fabulousness and vulnerability, is finally seeing the light of day.
All of Us Stars is published by Reference Point
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