PATRICK MCMULLAN |
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| Photograph by Patrick McMullan |
Patrick McMullan is an American photographer, columnist, television personality, publisher, art collector, philanthropist, businessman and documentarian. A New Yorker his whole life, born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and raised in Huntington, Long Island. Educated in New York University, McMullan majored in business marketing and "minored in Studio 54" as he jokingly says.
Patrick McMullan has become a top photographer with a full service photography agency in Manhattan, with a photo studio located in 321 West 14th Street. On his website he shows viewers a glimpse of the most exclusive events in New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami.
Patrick has also become a well known film and television personality with his frequen interviews and appearences in movies and TV recently on Gossip Girls, Full Frontal Fashion, Extra TV, Access Hollywood, E! Entertainment, NBC, ABC, Fox, and various other programs.
In addition to his photographs and publications (Glamour Girls, Kiss Kiss, Intents, so8os: A Photographic Diary of a Decade, Men's Show, and Secrets of Riviera. And is currently working on Klub Kidz and Patric McMullan's: BLONDS.) Patrick is also one of the world's most celebrated party, fashion, and society photographers. He holds many philanthropic issues close to his heart. As a cancer survivor himself (in 1981), he's given much of his time to raise awareness, funding, and press for organizations such as the Nation Hemophilia Foundation, the Fire Department of New York Foundation, and Art Walk to benefit the Coalition for the Homeless.
Ultimately McMullan has impacted pop culture and New York nightlife in ways never imagined. He has avery extensive archive collection which highlights all he has seen, lived through and photographed--and that it did, in fact, happen! And for that the world (and especially New York City) will be forever grateful.
McMullan currently lives in Greenwich Village, NYC, Long Island, and Miami Beach. His son, Liam McMullan is also a photographer, actor, and musician living in Manhattan.
"If you don't know Patrick McMullan, you ought to get out more!" - Andy Warhol, 1986
Artist Statement:
Klub Kids: Outlaws of A NYC Subculture (A Capsule Collection)
The Berlin Wall came down and the illegitimate children of Andy Warhol’s superstars were dressing up to party like it was the return of disco. A seductive flash of neon on New York’s cultural past, scarcely revealed, ending abruptly, and influencing the coming years; Klub Kids features unseen photographs of New York’s fabled characters and night crawlers in never-before-seen historic imagery.
A consummate chronicler, Patrick McMullan began his career in the late 1970’s shooting the downtown sphere with nothing more than a pocket camera and the encouragement of Annie Flanders, Susanne Bartsch and Andy Warhol. With the Klub Kids series of photographs, NYC’s black-and-white nightlife era suddenly turned color, both saturated and bright; McMullan – by then a father – gives us his 1988-1992 observational foray into the Oz Land that was this outlaw club scene subculture.
“Every day was Halloween for club kids,” recounts McMullan. “But the club-kid movement was not so much about drag as costume. In reaction to AIDS, they weren’t trying to score as much as score fame. It was about being memorable while the complicated costumes acted as a sort of shield.”
Shot in notorious nightspots like Limelight, Palladium, Webster Hall, Club USA, Tunnel, Roxy, and pop-up parties anywhere surrounding club king Michael Alig’s infamous Disco 2000 parties, it brings us into the outrageously uninhibited attitude of this wildly colorful period. Klub Kids celebrates the freedom of expression in a hedonistic culture that had nothing to lose (but life itself) and stardom to gain, if even for just one night, all through dressing up as an unforgettable character.
Filled with highlights and lowlights, its influence still exists today; paying the debt with a more connected reality that transcends pagers and what we now call the ‘new normal’. Through McMullan’s photos we have glimpse back to simpler times dressed in its own complications.
Collect Patrick's work at Gallery 446 here.
