Gilles Larrain, a lauded portrait photographer whose groundbreaking 1973 book, “Idols,” an explosively colorful collection of images of New York City drag queens and gender nonconformists, celebrated the pride and plumage of a subculture that at the time was largely ignored, if not scorned, by the mainstream, died on Oct. 7 in Kauai, Hawaii. He was 86.
His wife, Louda Larrain, said he died of a heart attack in a hospital.
Mr. Larrain spent his early career as a painter, and he came to view his ultimate medium, photography, as painting with light. Over the course of his career, he shot for magazines including Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vogue and Time, and he created shimmering, at times dreamlike, portraits of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Laurie Anderson, Norman Mailer and many others.
“Idols” marked something of a departure for Mr. Larrain: He was straight, and he had no ties to the drag world. Still, the book came to be regarded as a cult classic, celebrated as an early and daring celebration of gay and transgender life when it was largely lived in the shadows.
Among the “incredible birds of paradise,” as Mr. Larrain once put it, featured in “Idols” was the future actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein, then still a teenager. In one shot, he whirls beneath a red cape wearing harlequin print and glimmering green eye shadow.
Also in the book were so-called superstars from Andy Warhol’s Factory, like the actor, poet and writer Taylor Mead, looking pensive with a bejeweled necklace strung over his head, and the prominent underground actor Mario Montez, in flaming red lipstick.
There were members of the Cockettes, the hippie-drag performance troupe from San Francisco. The artist Al Hansen, who was affiliated with the Fluxus movement but not the drag scene, posed with his skin sprayed silver and a flowing robe, looking like a cross between a gender-fluid Roman senator and an extraterrestrial.
“‘Idols’ is one of the best photography books I’ve ever seen,” the photographer Ryan McGinley, known for his unvarnished portraits, wrote in Vice magazine in his introduction to an interview with Mr. Larrain in 2010.
After being out of print for years, “Idols” was republished in 2011 in expanded form by powerHouse Books of Brooklyn, to considerable fanfare in art and fashion circles. A review in Out magazine said Mr. Larrain’s photos “highlight the beautiful decadence of an era without ignoring the undercurrent of gritty desperation that propelled it forward.”
Additions for the new version included portraits of another Warhol Factory stalwart, Holly Woodlawn, immortalized in the Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side,” and the New York Dolls, proto-punks who outraged the squares with their femme attire, temptress lipstick and knee-high platform boots.
Mr. Larrain told Vice that he had become intrigued after seeing people from the drag world at Max’s Kansas City, the storied Manhattan nightclub that was a magnet for boundary-pushing artists and musicians.
“I thought, ‘I have to get those guys in the studio,’” he said, adding, “One came, then they all came.”
“It was pure improvisation,” he said. “We had a lot of junk lying around and they came by in groups of 20 or 30, and they all shared things, having fun with makeup, playing with wigs and whatever.”
“It was purely ‘divertissement,’ in the French sense,” he said. “To have fun, create fun and live fun.”
Gilles Michel Leon Larrain was born on Dec. 5, 1938, in Dalat, a city in the south-central highlands of what is now Vietnam and was then part of French Indochina. He was the younger of two children of Hernán Larrain, a diplomat with the Chilean consul as well as a painter and art collector, and Charlotte Mayer-Blanchy, a French-Vietnamese pianist and painter.
Like his parents, Gilles was drawn to drawing and painting during an itinerant youth in which he lived in Chile, Argentina, Canada and France before settling in New York City in his teens. After graduating from the Lycée Français in New York in 1957, he briefly studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University before enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied architecture.
His true passion was art, and after returning to New York in the 1960s, he started building a career as a painter, focusing on portraits and still lifes. He had his first solo gallery exhibition in 1966.
He also detoured into kinetic art, creating outsize sculptures involving water, smoke, neon and other elements that were displayed at the Paris Biennale and other exhibitions. He began to turn to photography as his primary medium later in the 1960s.
He was also a flamenco guitarist, and in 1983 he traveled to Andalusia to capture the passion and heritage of flamenco dancers and musicians. And in 1985 he collaborated with Robert Mapplethorpe, Deborah Turbeville and Roy Volkmann on the book “Exquisite Creatures,” a study of nudes. His moody portraits of Miles Davis were on the covers of the albums “Decoy” (1984) and “Aura” (1989).
He married Louda Ilyoushina, an artist and textile designer, in 2006. In 2013 the couple moved to Kauai, which reminded Mr. Larrain of his childhood in Vietnam.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Larrain is survived by a son, Lasco; a daughter, Olivia Larrain-Forsyth; and a sister, Marie-Monique Larrain. His marriages to Anne-Marie Maluski, Marie-Christine Bon and Isabella Coco Cummings ended in divorce.
To modern eyes, “Idols” might seem like a nostalgic ode to the anything-goes New York underground of the early 1970s. But perceptions were very different in the Nixon years, not long after the Stonewall rebellion helped ignite the gay rights movement in 1969.
The book was “not accepted by many layers of society,” Mr. Larrain said in a 2012 interview with the website A Shaded View on Fashion. Even some in the art world, he added, “found the subject outrageous at best, insulting and dangerous at worst.”
But, he said: “That was why the book came out. It was something that had to be presented to the population at large.”
What he was presenting, though, was no idealization of his models. “They don’t need to be idealized,” he said. “They are themselves.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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