Gail Thacker

Gail Thacker is a visual artist most known for her use of type 665 Polaroid positive/negative film in which her subjects — friends, lovers, the city — become intertwined with the process and chemistry of her photos. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts and has lived and worked in New York City since 1982. She is part of a group of artists called The Boston School.

Life Gail Thacker was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1959.

Thacker studied fine arts at the Atlanta Arts Alliance from 1976 to 1978. She then studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts concentrating on video, painting, and photography, and graduated in 1981. Thacker also studied at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1978 and 1981.

She moved to New York City in 1982. Mark, a photographer and performance artist, features in Thacker's photographs. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 and died in 1989. In New York City, the AIDS epidemic had already started by the time Thacker moved there. Thacker said in a lecture, "The only thing I have control over was my relationship with these Polaroids. This was the only way I could stop time from destroying the rest of my friends."

Thacker's process includes first aging the Polaroid photographs before developing them. She left some unrinsed photographs wrapped in plastic, which caused distortion of the images. She allowed images to sit in their chemicals for months to years before developing the negatives. Thacker said over email, "I have distressed my images to express a sense of inner agony. I sometimes feel a crippling knowledge that I am invisible and alone." the June Bateman Gallery, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, Clamp Art, and since then her work has documented the memory of the artistic community at the Gene Frankel Theatre. She has worked with artists such as Stephen Tashjian, Holly Woodlawn, Sur Rodney Sur and Arleen Schloss, and Chi Chi Valenti, keeping a sense of underground art and performance art alive in New York City.