His images ranged from men having sex (shot from a distance) to homeless friends who lived onsite.
This isn’t something a professional photographer would say.” “When people would come over to his home,” adds Bessa, “Baltrop would tell them to ‘catwalk through the photographs’. They were spread across his home in piles – some spilling onto the floor. The photos were not always taken care of in an archival manner. “He had a sophisticated eye for black and white photography and most of the photos here are vintage prints he developed himself.” “I don’t think Baltrop saw photography as a career, let’s say he saw it as a passion,” said Bessa. Baltrop, however, gained critical acclaim after Artforum critic Douglas Crimp wrote about his work in 2008. He only had a few exhibitions in his life, one at a gay nightclub. Marsha P Johnson by Alvin Baltrop Photograph: Courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust “He was a very poor man, he sustained himself driving a van, was a street vendor, he had a difficult life and photography was a passion, a labor of love. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Baltrop shot nude men sunbathing along the Hudson River and a stunning portrait of activist Marsha P Johnson.īut Baltrop struggled to make a living and among his odd jobs, he worked as a jewelry designer, a street vendor and a cab driver. They also take a snapshot of a city in ruin, and a queer community struggling for inclusion. His work, on view until next February, has been compared to photos by Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Gordon Matta-Clark, who made artwork at the very same set of piers. “Although initially terrified of the piers, I began to take these photos as a voyeur soon grew determined to preserve the frightening, mad, unbelievable, violent and beautiful things that were going on at that time,” Baltrop once said. However, it wasn’t just a study of architecture. He returned to New York to study art from 1973 to 1975, which led him to documenting the gay community in the West Village and along the piers from 1975 to 1986. “He took them with the eye of a gay or bisexual man acting out on his desires,” said Bessa. He served in the Navy during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, where he took some of his early portraits of sailors. His mother was a Jehovah’s Witness who despised his photos and threw out his artwork when he was a teenager, which led him to moving away from home. In the wake of counterculture, the end of hippie culture, social norms were changing, and this was happening at a global scale.”īaltrop, an African American photographer, was born in the Bronx in 1948.
“People say ‘that happened all the time,’ but not the extent as it did in the 1970s. “He documented a place where people could go to hook up and have sex in a public space,” said Bessa. The Piers (exterior) Photograph: Courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust