Description
Hardcover | 22.86 x 1.27 x 27.31 cm | 65 pp
Anthology Editions | 2024 | 9781944860639
Reissued for the first time in decades having been originally published in limited quantities in 1981, Halloween: A Fantasy in Three Acts collects photographs taken by Ken Werner at San Franciscos adult Halloween celebrations from 1976 to 1980. Werner assembled a visual narrative of American consciousness and popular culture as seen through lenses of queerness, black humour, and the macabre.
Once touted as the Mardi Gras of the West, the raunchy, mostly open-air nighttime costume parties documented by Werner were hugely popular events organised primarily by LGBT and sex worker advocates, attracting tens of thousands of curious attendees as well as conservative ire from around the nation.
This underground classic explores a bacchanalia worthy of the pagan and occult roots of the Halloween ritual – a magical dream/nightmare-land of terror and joy, with uninhibited celebrants revelling in stunning self-made guises that combine cartoon logic, sexual extravagance, and a highly irreverent take on American mythologies.
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