During his short life, David Wojnarowicz made paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos and texts that embraced queer culture without guilt or shame, participating in the alternative arts scene of New York’s East Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s. For the series of photographs Rimbaud in New York York, he pictured , a young man in decrepit parts of New York wearing a paper mask of the nineteenth- nineteenthcentury French poet Arthur Rimbaud. century Rimbaud’s wandering, short and dissolute life was a cocktail of poetry, drink and drugs, homosexuality and violence, making him an icon for Wojnarowicz’s own restless spirit. The passing years have added poignancy to the photographs, which capture the city in its last moments before the era of the Yuppy, soaring real estate prices that tidied everything up, and AIDS, which decimated the community to which Wojnarowicz belonged. We never know who the model is, perhaps the artist himself, a friend, or different people in each shot. Lonely, anonymous, romantic and squalid, these images are an eloquent reminder of the often cruel yet fertile relationship between the city and the artist.