Tabboo!,
Tabboo! 1982–1988. New York: Gordon Robichaux/Karma Books, 2021. 140 pages.
ONCE UPON A TIME in the early 1980s, New York City’s East Village was cheap and scary, a petrified forest of desiccated industry. Among the ruins, fantastic creatures built worlds of fantasy and devised strategies to survive. They made themselves at home. One of these creatures was Stephen Tashjian, who had come to New York with a gaggle of friends, each full of promise, after graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Some were photographers: Mark Morrisroe, the prolific punk, and Jack Pierson, the moody glamorpuss. Others, like Pat Hearn, Tashjian’s bandmate in Wild and Wonderful (by all accounts as advertised), with whom he lived in one of those fabled ’80s SoHo lofts before Hearn started her famed gallery, did a little of everything.