Revelling in Sheyla Baykal’s Epistolary Photography

In Rachel Cusk’s 2014 novel Outline, the protagonist becomes known primarily through her dialogue with the people around her – strangers, friends and family – rather than direct characterization. At Soft Network, an exhibition devoted to the work and archives of Turkish-American photographer Sheyla Baykal enacts a similar sleight of hand through Baykal’s own photographs, archival ephemera and portraits by other artists. We come to know the East Village artist and ‘vital fringe figure’, as The New York Times critic Holland Cotter described her in 2000, through her community: a fuzzy, bejewelled outline.

From the mid-1960s to her death in 1997, Baykal was best known for her portraits of now-famous downtown Manhattan figures, including Frank O’Hara, Marsha P. Johnson and Willem de Kooning. One of Baykal’s most iconic photographs might be Agosto Machado, Birdie Follies (1972), which depicts the revered performance artist and Stonewall activist in sparkly drag, his lips and eyebrows exaggeratedly overdrawn. The exhibition presents her entanglement with, and photographs of, these luminaries as a form of social practice. As I stood between a picture she took of Peter Hujar (Peter Hujar as Mother Goose, Birdie Follies, 1972) and one that Hujar took of her (Portrait of Sheyla Baykal and Frank Lima, 1967), I came to understand her practice as a kind of epistolary photography.

Sometimes her photographs are more fascinating for what (and who) they depicted than how. I sat through projections of 35mm colour slide photography of bedazzled performers from the Palm Casino Revue, the off-off-Broadway production Baykal helped produce after leaving the Angels of Light theatre troupe, or the Hot Peaches – a gay political theatre company active from 1970 to the early 2000s. Most of the photographs are shot close and unadorned, letting the subjects shine, but I found it difficult to discern a strong sense of Baykal’s style. The show offered just a taste of an entire queer downtown world, evidence of many fractured lineages. I sometimes felt I was in a historical exhibition about a scene, rather than one of photography.

But that is the challenge – and intrigue – of an exhibition like this, one that seeks to image the queer art of community. Perhaps Baykal’s most striking photograph is Jackie Curtis’ Wake (1985), in which three figures (Penny Arcade, Kevin Bradigan and John Heys) peer into an open coffin, huddled over it as if trying to stem the flow of loss. It appears in a section of the show dedicated to the folder that Baykal kept of her friends’ obituaries as they began to die from HIV/AIDS, poignantly juxtaposed with an accretion of ephemera, including an invitation for a memorial service for Johnson and an obituary for Hujar by Vince Aletti, parallel expressions of community grief. Upon being diagnosed herself with terminal cancer in 1996, Baykal asked Arcade, her friend and fellow artist, to be her ‘Death Mother’: a term Arcade has used to describe her stewardship of another’s artistic legacy. This solo show – which Arcade co-curated with Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez – is Baykal’s first in New York since 1993. What is on display, then, is a kind of care during life, as well as death.

In a diptych at the beginning of the exhibition, Self-portrait (1974), Baykal peers around her camera to look at the viewer, her gaze steady, her smile soft. She seems poised to ask the subject something, as if modelling her collaborative ethos. Below, Village View Houses, New York (1980) depicts a streetlamp-filled night in New York. A streak in the sky looks like a photographic light leak, but it might also be a slow-exposure shooting star, watching over the city.

‘dearly Loved friends: Photographs by Sheyla Baykal, 1965-1990’ is on view at Soft Network, New York until 10 May

^{Main image: Sheyla Baykal, Angels of Light performance Gossamer Wings, Theatre for the New City, 1973, scan from 35mm color slide. © 2025 Estate of Sheyla Baykal. Courtesy Penny Arcade, Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and Soft Network.}