David Armstrong (1954, Arlington, MA - 2014, Los Angeles, CA) was a photographer known for his photographs of young queer communities and subcultures over the course of his 40-year career. In the 1990s, however, he began a series of soft-focus landscape photographs, which were eventually exhibited at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. Armstrong noted, “At the time, I’d been doing a lot of shallow-focus portraits and was becoming increasingly interested in what was happening in the background rather than in the actual subject of the pictures.” Inspired by his early days as an aspiring painter, he added that his use of soft focus “seemed as much a photographic phenomenon to me as it was a homage to Pictorialism or painterly impressionism.” Armstrong is associated with the Boston School, a group of photographers clustered around graduates of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. His works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, GE; and Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, NY.