Overview

""Baltimore Portraits"" is a unique presentation of photographs by Amos Badertscher. These portraits - many accompanied by poignantly revealing, hand-written narratives about their subjects - represent a sector of Baltimore that has gone largely unnoticed and rarely has been documented. In this volume, the assemblage of images of bar and street people - transvestites, strippers, drug adicts, drag queens and hustlers - spans a 20-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Badertscher's arresting and melancholy photographs document a culture that has virtually disappeared due to substance abuse, AIDS and, often, societal and familial neglect. An introduction by Tyler Curtain contextualizes the photographs both within the history of Baltimore and its queer subculture and in relationship to contemporaneous work by photographers Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Duane Michaels and others. Curtain also positions the underlying concerns of Badertscher's art in relation to gay and lesbian cultural politics.

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9780822323341

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Reviews

Baltimore Portraits is a rich and stark picture of community: as beautiful as it is ugly, as depressing as it is joyful, as lean as it is full. Badertscher's photographs and their scrawling inscriptions are telling stories that we long to hear (or not hear) but rarely get. By picturing the unpictured, by writing the unsaid, our expectations are meaningfully betrayed. (Carol Mavor, author of Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs.) These images of many of the denizens of Baltimore's gay underground in the 1970s are often deeply disturbing. The literal nakedness of many of the subjects provides only a minimal index of how painfully exposed and vulnerable some of them are. I feel grateful to Amos Badertscher for having produced and preserved these images, and to Tyler Curtain for responsive generosity of his vision of them. (Michael Moon, author of A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol.)

Baltimore Portraits is a rich and stark picture of community: as beautiful as it is ugly, as depressing as it is joyful, as lean as it is full. Badertscher's photographs and their scrawling inscriptions are telling stories that we long to hear (or not hear) but rarely get. By picturing the unpictured, by writing the unsaid, our expectations are meaningfully betrayed. (Carol Mavor, author of Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs.) These images of many of the denizens of Baltimore's gay underground in the 1970s are often deeply disturbing. The literal nakedness of many of the subjects provides only a minimal index of how painfully exposed and vulnerable some of them are. I feel grateful to Amos Badertscher for having produced and preserved these images, and to Tyler Curtain for responsive generosity of his vision of them. (Michael Moon, author of A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol.)

Author Information

Amos Badertscher, a self-taught photographer, has had his work exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in Los Angeles and New York. In 1998, Badertscher, acollection of the artist’s photography was published by St. Martin’s Press. His work is included in several anthologies and is the subject of many published articles. Tyler Curtain is a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at Duke University.

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