A boisterous survey of one of New York’s most cherished gay underground photographers, Don’t Worry Boys finds Stanley Stellar at his most exuberant and layered, through an extensive reappraisal of his archives. A Brooklyn native, Stellar picked up a camera in 1976 and pointed it, almost immediately, at his own community: the West Village, Christopher Street, the abandoned piers that served for a few short years as a sunbathing ground, a cruising ground, a stage. Here, Stellar developed a vernacular language that carries both a pornographer’s frankness and a documentarian’s patience; a regular contributor to the literary Christopher Street magazine, the gay newspaper New York Native and the panoply of queer flesh magazines of the time, Stellar contains a high-low fluency that gives his work a grit and a candour most of his contemporaries never risked. Against the background of New York in its most unkempt and precarious, sex is everywhere and unapologetic: men frolicking and screwing in full daylight, skimpy clothing leaving little to the imagination, balanced against a natural, authentic record of Stellar’s milieu through intense, unguarded portraiture. That candour reaches its peak in the studio portraits made during the throes of the AIDS crisis which explore the nuances of gay experience, between introspection and exhibition. Of the hundreds of men who sat for Stellar in that period, only a small handful are still here to tell it.