Edited with text by Antonio Sergio Bessa. Text by Douglas Crimp.
Portraits of clandestine gay life on Manhattan's piers, in an authoritative overview published for Alvin Baltrop's first retrospective
For 11 years in 1970s and '80s Manhattan, the Bronx-born photographer Alvin Baltrop obsessively documented cruisers, sunbathers, fornicators and friends around the city's piers, in that brief moment after the Stonewall riots and before the explosion of the AIDS epidemic. The largest book yet published on the photographer, The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop presents those photographs and others, including many that have never been seen in public, and is published on the occasion of Baltrop's first-ever retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
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.
Featured image is reproduced from 'The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
New York Times: Photo Lens
Holland Cotter
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.
Hyperallergic
Danillo Machado
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.
Bookforum
Cara Hoffman
[A] work of beauty and cultural atonement...there is both a prosaic coziness and a mythic quality to Baltrop’s work.
Blind
Miss Rosen
...[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.
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 11 in. / 224 pgs / 200 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $69.95 ISBN: 9788857241838 PUBLISHER: Skira AVAILABLE: 11/26/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Skira. Edited with text by Antonio Sergio Bessa. Text by Douglas Crimp.
Portraits of clandestine gay life on Manhattan's piers, in an authoritative overview published for Alvin Baltrop's first retrospective
For 11 years in 1970s and '80s Manhattan, the Bronx-born photographer Alvin Baltrop obsessively documented cruisers, sunbathers, fornicators and friends around the city's piers, in that brief moment after the Stonewall riots and before the explosion of the AIDS epidemic. The largest book yet published on the photographer, The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop presents those photographs and others, including many that have never been seen in public, and is published on the occasion of Baltrop's first-ever retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
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.
