Pagan Babies - Hardcover

by John Denny Ashley (Author), Robert Morgan (Author), Pagan Babies (Author)

A vital moment in Kentucky's queer history captured in sumptuous visuals--half a century in the making.

The conceptual lovechild of photographer John Denny Ashley and artist Robert Morgan, Pagan Babies has at long last emerged as a vibrant witness to a particular moment in American history, a time when sexual revolution and gay liberation manifested even in small Southern towns like Lexington, Kentucky.

Pagan Babies, the name adopted by Morgan and his band of guerrilla-style street artists, was a natural moniker for this collection, which draws inspiration from art-house movies, Greek mythology, Ovid, Shakespeare, the decadence of Weimar Berlin, punk rock, the Pre-Raphaelites, David Bowie, and--above all--the expressive and ingenious realm of queer Kentucky.

In Robert Morgan, John Denny Ashley found his archetypal sexual outlaw, and in Ashley, Morgan discovered an artistic collaborator worthy of documenting the emerging free-spirited, sexually adventurous rebels of the American South. Together, they brought forth a collective work that serves as a bracing testament to Morgan's baroque imagination and Ashley's talent for breathing life into his vision.

The result is this book. At last.

Author Biography

John Denny Ashley's (1946-2006) life work was the pursuit and wooing of his first love, photography. His first photographs emulated the work of early pictorialist photographers such as John Brook, Nell Dorr, and Wynn Bullock. But, when he combined photography with his pleasure at being alone in nature, he produced his first defining period of work shooting along the Elkhorn Creek and in the Red River Gorge. As a loner, Ashley was appreciative of others who lingered on the margins of life. This insight led him into photographing subjects who could exhibit their "otherness" before the camera. He also found a niche in animal portraiture, which produced his only publication, the 1990 Simon and Schuster book, Thoroughbred: A Celebration of the Breed. In his last years he was deprived of his favorite things and places by a prolonged illness. He had always looked for the unusual angle, the perfect light, then he captured the image in his lens before it slipped into oblivion. Robert Morgan's family goes back to the earliest European settlers of Kentucky. Shaped by his Catholic childhood, Haight-Ashbury, and the AIDS epidemic, Morgan, now in his seventies, has been a LGBTQ activist since before Stonewall. Morgan was taught art by his mother Elizabeth, an artist from Troublesome Creek in Breathitt County, Kentucky. As a teen he was taken in by artist Henry Faulkner who mentored him in the homosexual skills of survival. As a child Morgan began collecting found objects and trinkets, arranging them into small bedside altars. This process remains the basis for his iconic sculptures. His work renders the marginalized: young addicts, queers, and street people. Remaining in conversation with his first artistic impulse, he creates memorials to new and ancient stories of birth, death, and rebirth that center the struggles and loss of those who often go unnoticed.