The Hug, N.Y.C.

1970s

School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

She enrolls at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts together with her friend from Satya, David Armstrong; there she meets Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe and begins to photograph in color. She graduates in 1977 or 1978: she has worked mostly with Cibachrome prints but has also begun showing slides, and her work of this period is associated with the Boston School of Photography.

late 1970s

Move to New York

After graduating she moves to New York and begins documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene and the city's vibrant post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

late 1970s

Her subjects take shape

By the end of the 1970s her circle of subjects takes shape: domestic sketches with her boyfriend Brian, drug-addicted friends, cross-dressers, the New York bohemia. Her themes — sexual assertiveness and confession — are tied to gender, provocation and the new realism.

1980–1983

Films with Bette Gordon and Sara Driver

She acts alongside her friend, the Irish artist Vivienne Dick, in Bette Gordon's “Empty Suitcases” (1980) and, in “Variety” (1983), plays a character named Nan while photographing the production; those pictures were published in 2009. For Sara Driver she shoots stills for “You Are Not I” (1981), starring her lover and friend Suzanne Fletcher, and plays one of the accident victims herself.

1981

“New York/New Wave” at PS1

Taking part in the “New York/New Wave” exhibition at PS1 gives her first exposure to a wider audience. Before that her slideshows were shown in clubs: the first in New York was at Frank Zappa's birthday party at the Mudd Club, with her boyfriend as DJ, and on another occasion a live band, the Del Byzanteens with Jim Jarmusch, accompanied the screening.