Gerard Malanga

Gerard Joseph Malanga (born March 20, 1943) is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, actor, curator and archivist.

Early life and education
Malanga was born in the Bronx in 1943, the only child of Italian immigrant parents. In 1959, at the beginning of his senior year at the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan, Malanga became a regular on Alan Freed's The Big Beat, televised on Channel 5 (WNEW) in New York City. He graduated from high school with a major in Advertising Design (1960).

He enrolled at the University of Cincinnati's College of Art & Design (1960), and dropped out at the end of the Spring semester.

In the fall of 1961, Malanga was admitted to Wagner College in Staten Island on a fellowship. At Wagner he befriended one of his English professors, Willard Maas, and his wife Marie Menken, who became his mentors. In June 1963, he went to work for Andy Warhol and dropped out of Wagner College in 1964.

Andy Warhol and The Factory
Malanga worked with Andy Warhol from 1963 to 1970. A February 17, 1992 article in The New York Times referred to him as "Andy Warhol's most important associate." Malanga was introduced to Warhol through Charles Henri Ford.

Malanga was involved in Warhol's silkscreen painting and filmmaking. He acted in the films, including Kiss in 1963, Harlot in 1964, Soap Opera in 1964, Couch in 1964, Vinyl in 1965, Camp in 1965, Chelsea Girls in 1966, and co-produced Bufferin in 1967, in which he reads his poetry, deemed to be the longest spoken-word movie on record at 33-minutes nonstop.

Malanga played a combination of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby in Warhol's film Since (1966). Also in 1966, he choreographed the music of the Velvet Underground for Warhol's multimedia presentation, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Malanga and Warhol collaborated on the nearly 500 individual 3-minute Screen Tests, which resulted in a selection for a book of the same name, published by Kulchur Press, in 1967. Neither Warhol or Malanga were photographers at the time. In 1969, Malanga was one of the founding editors, along with Warhol and John Wilcock, of Interview magazine.

In December 1970, Malanga left Warhol's studio to pursue his work in photography. Malanga's photography spans over four decades and includes portraits, nudes and the urban documentation of "New York's Changing Scene." Three of his notable portraits are of Charles Olson for the interview he made with Olson for The Paris Review in 1969, Iggy Pop nude in the penthouse apartment they shared one summer weekend in 1971, and William Burroughs in front of the corporate headquarters that bears his family name in 1975. In total, Malanga has photographed hundreds of poets and artists over the years as well as Herbert Gericke, the last farmer in Staten Island, in 1981, and Jack Kerouac's typewritten roll for On the Road in 1983.

In his introduction to Malanga's first monograph, Resistance to Memory (Arena Editions, 1998), Ben Maddow, a photo historian and poet, said, "Malanga has that great essential virtue of the photographer: humility before the complex splendor of the real thing...Malanga is the photo-historian of this culture." In reviewing Malanga's book two years later, Screen Tests Portraits Nudes 1964-1996 (Steidl), Fred McDarrah remarked that "Malanga is among the elite editors and photographers who have long dazzled and propelled the New York avant garde."

Malanga has shot and produced 12 films. In 2024, Gerard was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

Poetry

 * Screen Tests: A Diary (with Andy Warhol) (1967)
 * The Last Benedetta Poems (1969)
 * Gerard Malanga Selbsporträt eines Dichters (1970)
 * 10 Poems for 10 Poets Black Sparrow Press (1970)
 * chic death (1971)
 * Wheels of Light (1972)
 * The Poetry of Night, Dawn and Dream/Nine Poems for César Vallejo (1972)
 * Licht/Light (1973, bilingual)
 * Incarnations: Poems 1965-1971 (1974)
 * Rosebud (1975)
 * Leaping Over Gravestones (1976)
 * Ten Years After: The Selected Benedetta Poems (1977)
 * 100 years have passed (1978)
 * This Will Kill That (1983)
 * Three Diamonds Black Sparrow Press (1991)
 * Mythologies of the Heart, Black Sparrow Press (1996)
 * No Respect: New & Selected Poems 1964-2000, Black Sparrow Press (2001)
 * AM: Archives Malanga, Volumes 1, 2, 3 & 4 (2011)
 * Three Broadside Poems, Bottle of Smoke Press (2013)
 * ''Malanga Chasing Vallejo: Selected Poems: Cesar Vallejo: New Translations and Notes: Gerard Malanga. Three Rooms Press, Bilingual edition (2014)
 * Tomboy & Other Tales, Bottle of Smoke Press (2014)
 * Whisper Sweet Nothings & Other Poems, Bottle of Smoke Press (2017)
 * Cool & Other Poems, Bottle of Smoke Press (2019)

Editor

 * The Brief Hidden Life of Angus MacLise
 * The Collected Poetry of Piero Heliczer

Photography

 * Screen Tests/A Diary, in collaboration with Andy Warhol (1967)
 * Six Portraits (1975)
 * Portrait: Theory (With Robert Mapplethorpe, David Attie, and others) (1981)
 * Autobiography of a Sex Thief (1985)
 * Good Girls (1994)
 * Seizing the Moment (1997)
 * Resistance to Memory (1998)
 * Screen Tests Portraits Nudes 1964-1996 (2000)
 * Someone's Life (2008)
 * Photobooths (Waverly Press, NYC, 2013)
 * Ghostly Berms (Waverly Press, NYC, 2013)
 * Julien Mérieau, Astonish me! / étonnez-moi! (Warm, 2016)
 * The Beats Portfolio (Bottle of Smoke Press, 2018)

Photo and written biographies

 * Long Day's Journey into the Past: Gunnar B. Kvaran speaks with Gerard Malanga (2008)
 * Souls (2010)
 * Gerard Malanga by Lars Movin (2011)

Films

 * Academy Leader (1964)
 * Andy Warhol: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man (1965)
 * Prelude to International Velvet Debutante (1966)
 * Portrait of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (1966). World premiere: Vienna International Film Festival, 2005.
 * In Search of the Miraculous (1967)
 * The Recording Zone Operator (1968, incomplete)
 * The filmmaker records a portion of his life in the month of August (1968)
 * Preraphaelite Dream (with music by Angus MacLise, 1968)
 * The Children (AFI grant with music by Angus MacLise, 1969)
 * April Diary (1970)
 * Vision (incorporating Bufferin, 1976)
 * Gerard Malanga's Film Notebooks, with music by Angus MacLise (2005).

Music

 * THREE weeks WITH my DOG with 48 Cameras (1999)
 * Angus MacLise, The Cloud Doctrine produced by Gerard Malanga (w/ Guy Marc Hinant), 2003.