When Anton Yelchin died suddenly in the summer of 2016, he was just beginning to turn one part of his private life public. Some friends already knew the 27-year-old actor as a talented photographer. Niche arts and culture magazines had printed his work, and he was planning a one-off show with an artist collective, a part of the fledgling career that he envisioned would run parallel to his work in film. Yelchin never got to see the fruits of that labor, though. And now, a selection of 54 photographs from his life’s work—some never before seen—have landed in De Buck Gallery in Chelsea, the first solo show for a photographer gone too soon.

“We all knew that Anton was a prolific artist, but I, for one, never realized the extent of his artistry,” said Bryce Dallas Howard, Yelchin’s Terminator Salvation (2009) co-star who attended the show’s private opening on Wednesday night. “He was so exceptional, and so clearly had a profound destiny as an artist. When we lost Anton we not only lost a friend, we lost an immense talent and humanitarian whose impact and work we truly believed would be with us for decades.”

Even with New York’s first snowfall of the season looming, the private opening for “Anton Yelchin: Provocative Beauty” turned out a good-sized crowd of friends and family. Along with Howard, actors Ben Foster and Kristen Stewart showed up in support, each taking a moment to chat with his parents Irina and Victor Yelchin.

The exhibit is co-curated by Clayton Calvert, a friend to Yelchin’s former publicist and confidante Sara Planco, who first approached Calvert with the photos, and Rachel Vancelette, managing director of De Buck Gallery. Neither knew Yelchin personally, but have “gotten to know him through the work and because of the work,” as Calvert put it.

Vancelette told Vanity Fair the day after the show’s opening night that the process of selecting photos felt slightly transgressive and intimate. “It was like looking through someone’s diary,” she said. “It was like looking through someone's evaluation of how their life was. Not to know the person and not be able to ask him what his thoughts are or what he would want is a complicated task as a curator.”

“You want to make sure that the family, the friends, and everyone who knew him in life felt like it was to the level of what they would want him to have,” she added.

Yelchin mainly worked in portraiture, and always used film, whether with disposables or his Leica. Calvert and Vancelette broke the show into two overarching themes separated by two rooms. The front space is “harmonious” and “it feels very American”; as the viewers move to the back, they encounter the fetish images, ones that included many masked individuals and “the darker kind of images of these people in their nightlife or their secret lives,” according to Vancelette. It’s a dichotomy that could be applied to Yelchin himself, a movie star nurturing a secret career out of the spotlight. (Toward the end of his life, some of his work could be found in magazines like Bullett or Autre, which printed a series that he shot a month before the car accident).

There’s no record documenting the circumstances behind the photographs; much of what’s known about them is dependent on stories friends and families have told. The curiosity piqued from the images—many self-portraits, but also haunting portraits of known characters like James Goldstein—makes one hope friends and family will piece together a history in addition to exhibiting them.

The show is free to the public, and the artist’s portion of proceeds from the sale of prints will go to the nonprofit Yelchin’s parents started in their son’s name, the Anton Yelchin Foundation, which aids artists who suffer from disease or disability. “Anton Yelchin: Provocative Beauty” will remain open through Saturday, January 20, 2018.

An image has been moved at the request of the Yelchin family.