Michael Alago signed Metallica, shepherded White Zombie, and executive-produced Nina Simone’s final album. Then he picked up a camera and never looked back. His fourth monograph, Polaroid Encounters: 1998–2009, is now available from Shining Life Press, featuring 200 analog portraits spanning a decade of New York City desire, shot before dating apps rewrote the rules of the hunt. Full details and where to order below.
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Polaroid Encounters: 1998–2009 is a 142-page hardcover that collects two hundred candid and posed Polaroids taken in New York, Dallas, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Alago’s subjects include friends, models, bodybuilders, tattooed roughnecks, and ex-con boyfriends, many of whom were photographed in his Chelsea apartment. The collection deliberately closes a specific chapter. 2009 was the same year the gay porn magazine Mandate ceased publication, as the internet reshaped everything. The book’s introduction is by Jack Fritscher, a pioneering author, editor, and former partner of Robert Mapplethorpe.
Alago’s story is an only-in-New-York career arc. A gay teen who grew up in Hasidic Brooklyn, he dove headfirst into the NYC punk scene, booking bands at the East Village club the Ritz before emerging at twenty-four as a risk-taking, genre-crossing A&R executive who signed Metallica and went on to work with White Zombie, John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd., Misfits, Cyndi Lauper, and Nina Simone, for whom he executive-produced her final album, A Single Woman. After surviving AIDS in the Nineties and recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, Alago left the music business in 2003 to pursue photography full-time. Polaroid Encounters is his fourth monograph, following Rough Gods, Brutal Truth, and Beautiful Imperfections.
Sean Yseult of White Zombie contributes back-cover commentary, calling Alago “a master of composition” who constantly seeks out “a smile, a fist, a tattoo that he cannot resist”, and describing the images as “shocking, sexy, rough, tough, and gorgeous.”
Alago’s career is documented in the 2017 film Who the F**k Is That Guy? The Fabulous Journey of Michael Alago, available on Amazon and YouTube, and in his 2020 memoir, I Am Michael Alago: Breathing Music, Signing Metallica, Beating Death.
Polaroid Encounters is a limited edition available exclusively through Shining Life Press. The first one hundred copies include a signed Polaroid from Alago’s personal collection.