Robert Giard

Robert Giard (July 22, 1939 – July 16, 2002) was an American portrait, landscape, and figure photographer.

Early life Giard was a native of Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in a working-class household. He majored in English literature and received a B.A. from Yale University in 1961, then an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Boston University in 1965. For a time, he taught intermediate grades at the New Lincoln School.

Career By 1972, he began as a photographer, concentrating on landscapes of the South Fork of Long Island, portraits of friends, many of them artists and writers in the region, and the nude figure.

Giard continued photographing nudes, still lives, and landscapes throughout the rest of his career. The vast majority of Giard's photography was on black-and-white film. He used a twin-lens reflex Rolleicord camera on a tripod and did not use artificial lights. By the late 1970s, he started to teach photography at Southampton Community College.

Particular Voices Ultimately, it would be in the area of the formal portrait that Giard's career made its most indelible mark. In 1985, Giard saw performances of two plays dealing with the AIDS crisis: Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart and William Hoffman's As Is. Giard felt compelled to photograph gay and lesbian writers in the face of death and societal oppression.

He documented queer figures in straightforward, unadorned, yet sometimes witty and playful portraits, focusing on a wide survey of significant gay and lesbian literary lights. The photos were taken in a wide variety of poses and settings, and often included people and pets who were close to the subjects.

By the time of his death, Giard had documented over 600 queer writers in this project. The majority of his subjects were white, but a significant number were writers of color. Although this project was initially named for its focus on gay and lesbian writers, it included some bisexual and trans writers as well. The published anthology of Particular Voices won a Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Photography/Art Book in 1997.

Queer Views was another final unfinished project: a series on early queer activists. Giard explicitly names trans activists as within its scope. The annual Robert Giard Fellowship is a $10,000 grant to visual artists whose work addresses sexuality, gender, and issues of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity.