Michael Prendergast, May 2004

Prendergast’s First Showing Candace Russell, Independent Growing up in a home filled with photographs had a profound influence on Fort Lauderdale photographer Michael Prendergast. “My mother loved photographing events,” he says. “I almost inherited this from her. I remember her pictures from World War II, the Depression and her women friends.” For the past twenty years, Prendergast has been snapping away for his own amusement. The encouragement of friends like fellow artist Chris Yoculan led to a new development for the lensman. On May 3, his first-ever public showing of his images will open at Stonewall Library & Archives, 1717 North Andrews Ave. in Fort Lauderdale with a reception open to the public from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The exhibition, which continues through May 29, is the first step in a photography career that means further exposure and the possibility of sales. “It’s sort of a big deal for me developmentally,” he says. People’s faces attract him. “I’ll see a wonderful face with great bone structure,” says Prendergast, “or I’ll notice someone with a priceless expression. I’ve never been trained to do this. I’ve been photographing since the early 1980s. I’m not a professional. I don’t make money at it and I’m not under a financial constraint to do so. In fact, I give my photos away. It’s interesting when you see the same people over and over.” Unstructured environments and unposed pictures without any special lighting or technical gimmickry are his specialty. Prendergast, who never goes anywhere without his Fuji digital camera in his back pocket, focuses on gay and transgender subjects, including professional entertainers. “I usually go up to people and ask if I can take their picture and usually they say it’s fine,” he says. “Then I go home and play with the photos that are manipulated on my computer with various programs.” While most digital photographers use Adobe PhotoShop, as does Prendergast, he expands to also use six other programs as well in making changes to faces that he shoots from “simple to severe,” as he puts it. “There is a drawing and painting program,” he explains. “If you take a great photograph of a landscape and want to remove a telephone pole, you take a paint brush and swipe it across the whole image. Then everything blends better. He prints his own images in a thirteen-inch by nineteen-inch format, blown up from the pictures he takes easily. “I don’t have a camera that’s bulky or status,” he says. “When I made the transition to digital ten years ago, my creative process really grew. I have images from the 1980s I can use today from twenty gay pride parades in New York City, various Halloweens, and trips throughout the U.S. and Europe. If I stopped photographing, I could still entertain myself for years.” The only drawback to the process is cost. “I probably spend a good chunk of money on printing cartridges, which are around $14 apiece,” he says. Though the Stonewall exhibition may be his first gallery showing, the photographer hasn’t been shy about showing his images in another way. “I do something that is very unusual,” he says. “I have four books measuring eight inches by eleven inches with my pictures that I show to people at parties. It’s like a walking gallery. I consider myself a historian of people’s lives when someone sees a picture I took two years ago of a boyfriend who passed away.” Having moved to Fort Lauderdale from Northampton, MA just one year ago, Prendergast is getting accustomed to the area and enjoying his old house in an established neighborhood. “I used to come down here on vacation,” he says. “Then I got a job here so I moved. I knew I could do it once I survived a summer without air-conditioning in my car. “I knew a lot of people before coming here when I would visit in the winter. Fort Lauderdale has a very vibrant gay community. It’s very diverse and not pretentious, though that may change as the price of real estate goes up and we lose a portion of the population who can’t afford to live here. I like the way everything is — that’s the conservative part of me.” Getting deeper into his photography is a goal he enjoys pursuing. “I need to discipline myself to do more reading of manuals,” says Prendergast who counts Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cecil Beaton among his favorite photographers. “Hopefully, as technical aspects of photography change, new things will happen. There’s a whole future ahead of learning and doing.”