The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop

(Hardback)

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The photographer who obsessively documented New York's early underground gay culture, on the occasion of his first retrospective. For 11 obsessive years in 1970s and '80s, the Bronx-born photographer Alvin Baltrop documented the alternative world that existed in this once-run-down part of the city, capturing cruisers, sun-bathers, fornicators, and friends in that brief moment after the Stonewall riots and before the explosion of the AIDS epidemic. The book presents those photos and others by Baltrop, including many that have never been shown in public, and is publicated on the occasion of the late artist's first-ever retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Born in 1948, Baltrop picked up photography in his teens. He carried his camera with him to Vietnam, where he served in the navy and made a habit of photographing his fellow sailors. He moved back to New York in 1972, enrolling at the School of Visual Arts. He began shooting the piers in 1975 - a project, thousands of negatives deep, that would come to encompass much of his life. He was so dedicated to it that he quit his day job as a taxi driver and would often photograph at the piers for days straight, living out of a van. "Although initially terrified of the piers, I began to take these photos as a voyeur [and] soon grew determined to preserve the frightening, mad, unbelievable, violent, and beautiful things that were going on at that time," Baltrop wrote in the preface to an unfinished book of these photographs. "To get certain shots, I hung from the ceilings of several warehouses utilizing a makeshift harness, watching and waiting for hours to record the lives that these people led (friends, acquaintances, and strangers), and the unfortunate ends that they sometimes met." After a lengthy battle with cancer, Baltrop died in 2004, having exhibited his work very few times during his lifetime.

Reviews

...[Baltrop] joyously celebrated the exquisite ecstasy of the male form....reveled in the outlaw spirit of the 1970s, capturing all the delicious decadence and joy de vivre at the dawn of the Gay Liberation Movement in the innocent, free spirited years before the devastating advent of AIDS.--Miss Rosen "Blind"
[A] work of beauty and cultural atonement...there is both a prosaic coziness and a mythic quality to Baltrop's work.--Cara Hoffman "Bookforum"
More than portraits of the Piers, Alvin Baltrop's photos become documentation of the AIDS crisis in the '80s, which deeply impacted (and continues to impact) queer communities and communities of color.--Danillo Machado "Hyperallergic"
The piers became a preserve for gay sex and communion, and the primary subject of Mr. Baltrop's surviving photographs. These include architectural studies of the piers, but also shots of their semi-residential population of homeless people, teenage runaways, sexual adventurers, criminals and artists.--Holland Cotter "New York Times: Photo Lens"

Author Bio

Sergio Bessa is the director of curatorial and education programs at the Bronx Museum, and a teacher of museum education at Columbia University Teachers College.