Perspectives 179: Alvin Baltrop: Dreams Into Glass

Perspectives 179: Alvin Baltrop Dreams Into Glass

CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON

CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON

Alvin Baltrop Dreams Into Glass

Alvin Baltrop Dreams Into Glass

US $14.95

DREAMS INTO GLASS

My dreams turn into glass and shatter before my eyes and I am blinded, by desire, by anger, by passion, by obsession.

My dreams turn into smoke and evaporate with my breath and I am choked by need, by power, by strength, by fear.

My dreams are silenced by reality and I am left mute by time, by infinity, by hate, by love.

My dreams turn into ashes and are gone with the wind, but I pray that they, like the phoenix, will one day rise again and soar with me beyond this place.

1

Valerie Cassel Oliver Douglas Crimp

Preface

Randal Wilcox

Afterword

Alvin Baltrop Dreams into Glass Perspectives 179 CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON

2

3

Valerie Cassel Oliver Douglas Crimp

Preface

Randal Wilcox

Afterword

Alvin Baltrop Dreams into Glass Perspectives 179 CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON

2

3

This publication has been prepared in conjunction with Perspectives 179—Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass organized by Senior Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, July 20–October 21, 2012.

The Perspectives Series is made possible by a major grant from Fayez Sarofim and by donors to the Museum’s Perspectives Fund: Anonymous Bright Star Productions Inc. Dillon Kyle Architecture Heidi and David Gerger Kerry Inman and Denby Auble Mady and Ken Kades Karol Kreymer and Robert J. Card, M.D. Poppi Massey Leslie and Shannon Sasser in Honor of Lynn Herbert William F. Stern Martha Claire Tompkins 20K Group, LLC Perspectives catalogues are made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston.

Funding for the Museum’s operations through the Fund for the Future is made possible by generous grants from Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, Anonymous, Jereann Chaney, Jo and Jim Furr, Barbara and Michael Gamson, Brenda and William Goldberg, Mr. and Mrs. I.H. Kempner III, Marley Lott, Leticia Loya, and Fayez Sarofim.

The Museum’s operations and programs are made possible through the generosity of the Museum’s trustees, patrons, members, and donors. The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston receives partial operating support from the Houston Endowment, the City of Houston through the Houston Museum District Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and The Wortham Foundation, Inc. CAMH also thanks its artist benefactors for their support, including Ricci Albenda, Anonymous, McArthur Binion, Brendan Cass, Mel Chin, Leonardo Drew, Tim Gardner, Robert Gober, Wayne Gonzales, Oliver Herring, Jim Hodges, Michael Joo, Kurt Kauper, Jon Kessler, Terence Koh, Sean Landers, Zoe Leonard, Marilyn Minter, Donald Moffett, Ernesto Neto, Roxy Paine, Laurie Simmons, Josh Smith, Marc Swanson, and William Wegman.

CONTENTS

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012942421 ISBN 978-1-933619-39-2 © 2012 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 5216 Montrose Boulevard Houston, Texas 77006-6547 Tel: (713) 284-8250 Fax: (713) 284-8275 www.camh.org Available through D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd floor New York, NY 10013 Tel: (212) 627-1999, Fax: (212) 627-9484 www.artbook.com Publication coordinators: Valerie Cassel Oliver and Nancy O’Connor Copy editor: Polly Koch Design: Don Quaintance, Public Address Design Design/production assistant: Elizabeth Frizzell Printing: EarthColor Houston Typography: Freight Sans and Whitman

Cover: The Piers (male portrait in sunlight), 1975–86

6

Foreword

11

Preface Douglas Crimp

13

Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass

16

CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION

57

Afterword

60

Biography and Bibliography

62

Works in the Exhibition

Bill Arning

Valerie Cassel Oliver

Randal Wilcox

Back cover: Three Navy Sailors, 1969–72 Page 1: Unattributed poem found in Alvin Baltrop’s papers Frontispiece: The Piers (man standing on the dock), 1975–86

Official Airline of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

4

All courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming , New York

5

This publication has been prepared in conjunction with Perspectives 179—Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass organized by Senior Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, July 20–October 21, 2012.

The Perspectives Series is made possible by a major grant from Fayez Sarofim and by donors to the Museum’s Perspectives Fund: Anonymous Bright Star Productions Inc. Dillon Kyle Architecture Heidi and David Gerger Kerry Inman and Denby Auble Mady and Ken Kades Karol Kreymer and Robert J. Card, M.D. Poppi Massey Leslie and Shannon Sasser in Honor of Lynn Herbert William F. Stern Martha Claire Tompkins 20K Group, LLC Perspectives catalogues are made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston.

Funding for the Museum’s operations through the Fund for the Future is made possible by generous grants from Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, Anonymous, Jereann Chaney, Jo and Jim Furr, Barbara and Michael Gamson, Brenda and William Goldberg, Mr. and Mrs. I.H. Kempner III, Marley Lott, Leticia Loya, and Fayez Sarofim.

The Museum’s operations and programs are made possible through the generosity of the Museum’s trustees, patrons, members, and donors. The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston receives partial operating support from the Houston Endowment, the City of Houston through the Houston Museum District Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and The Wortham Foundation, Inc. CAMH also thanks its artist benefactors for their support, including Ricci Albenda, Anonymous, McArthur Binion, Brendan Cass, Mel Chin, Leonardo Drew, Tim Gardner, Robert Gober, Wayne Gonzales, Oliver Herring, Jim Hodges, Michael Joo, Kurt Kauper, Jon Kessler, Terence Koh, Sean Landers, Zoe Leonard, Marilyn Minter, Donald Moffett, Ernesto Neto, Roxy Paine, Laurie Simmons, Josh Smith, Marc Swanson, and William Wegman.

CONTENTS

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012942421 ISBN 978-1-933619-39-2 © 2012 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 5216 Montrose Boulevard Houston, Texas 77006-6547 Tel: (713) 284-8250 Fax: (713) 284-8275 www.camh.org Available through D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd floor New York, NY 10013 Tel: (212) 627-1999, Fax: (212) 627-9484 www.artbook.com Publication coordinators: Valerie Cassel Oliver and Nancy O’Connor Copy editor: Polly Koch Design: Don Quaintance, Public Address Design Design/production assistant: Elizabeth Frizzell Printing: EarthColor Houston Typography: Freight Sans and Whitman

Cover: The Piers (male portrait in sunlight), 1975–86

6

Foreword

11

Preface Douglas Crimp

13

Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass

16

CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION

57

Afterword

60

Biography and Bibliography

62

Works in the Exhibition

Bill Arning

Valerie Cassel Oliver

Randal Wilcox

Back cover: Three Navy Sailors, 1969–72 Page 1: Unattributed poem found in Alvin Baltrop’s papers Frontispiece: The Piers (man standing on the dock), 1975–86

Official Airline of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

4

All courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming , New York

5

FOREWORD

T

he Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is proud to present Perspectives 179—Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass. Baltrop was a preternaturally observant and poetic photographer who died of cancer in 2004 at fifty-five years old, which brings up the marvelously thorny issue of how photographs made decades ago could be considered “contemporary.”

Because the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is first and foremost a contemporary venue, most of the time we show artists whose futures are likely much longer than their pasts, promising artists whose best years we believe are ahead of them. When we feel strongly that an artist who is no longer living needs an exhibition, we have to ask ourselves the very tough question of “why?”

When Baltrop’s work came up in my regular—and always fascinating— discussions about potential future programming with CAMH’s Senior Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, we were both enthusiastic about bringing his work to the Museum. We shared memorable recent first encounters with his work that had profoundly affected us, and we were shocked that his photographs—memorably conceived and executed, with a poet’s eye for resonant details—had remained unseen as long as they had. Clearly, letting viewers see this work was an imperative for us.

I first learned about Alvin Baltrop’s work when I attended a lecture by Douglas Crimp at Harvard University in 2007, where he presented a chapter from his memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s. Crimp has been an intellectual hero of mine and an inspiration since I started in the field, so this was an exciting night for me. His observations about art world politics and the prejudices of that period were priceless, witty, and a corrective to the notion that only one type of work was being made during those times.

Most crucially, Crimp explicated how the socioeconomic conditions of a depressed New York City in the seventies allowed for space abandoned by industry to be claimed by renegade artists as well as gay men, groups with whom he was affiliated. He showed recently discovered images by Baltrop of the late artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End (1975), a classic elegant sculpture cut into an abandoned pier on the Hudson River near Greenwich Village.

6

The piers had been discovered years earlier as an ideal cruising space for the first generation of gay men to experience the uncorking of desire that occurred culture-wide in the late sixties. It allowed them to form ever larger, if still underground, communities in new ways. While dangerous and decrepit, the piers were an exciting hunting ground for sex partners, friends, and lovers, an insanely democratic experiment allowing classes and races to mix in unprecedented ways. Baltrop, as a Black man, might not have been able to photograph freely in most of the emerging gay venues of the period, but at the piers he could.

The mid-seventies, in both art history and the history of alternative sexualities, is a uniquely romantic and problematic period. Artists of the Minimalist and Post-Minimalist era like Gordon Matta-Clark have been called non-ironically members of “the greatest generation,” and spaces like DIA:Beacon in Beacon, New York, are essentially pilgrimage sites where visitors genuflect before icons of this legacy installed in their most perfect form. For gay men, the period between Stonewall and the appearance of AIDS was a similar golden age, a time in which a radical rethinking of the possibilities of existence as fully embodied, uninhibited, sexual, and romantic beings was being explored for the first time.

Crimp had inhabited that space in his capacity both as an art critic and as a participant in the cruising rites of early liberation, so the images served as a perfect point of departure for reconsidering the multiple worlds he has negotiated in his long career. That these photographs survived and were now available for a younger generation to view was a miracle. That markers of the golden ages of both postwar sculpture and radical sociosexual change could have been recorded on the same negative was too good to be true.

Baltrop’s photographs of anonymous sex were the catalyst for a swelling of new interest in his work. We art world mavens quickly discovered, and conveyed in a slew of articles and exhibitions, that Baltrop had been a classic documentary photographer from his earliest years, taking pictures in the Navy. Crimp soon published an essay on Baltrop’s work in Artforum, with the artist’s image on the cover of the issue.

Crimp again wrote on Baltrop for Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present,

presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Third Streaming in SoHo then mounted a major show of Baltrop’s work, which received glowing press in Artforum and the New York Times.

Douglas Crimp, Third Streaming’s Yona Backer, and Randal Wilcox—Baltrop’s friend and the person who has devoted himself to preserving Baltrop’s legacy—have been crucial in making this project a reality, and for that we are very grateful.

Senior Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver is acknowledged as among the world’s leading scholars on the work of artists of African descent, and her scholarship on Baltrop continues in her award-winning tradition of bringing artists into the mainstream dialogue who should have been there all along, but were not. Her team in CAMH’s Curatorial Department, Dean Daderko and Nancy O’Connor, are united in their vision of art as an endeavor that changes lives and engages people.

They have helped this project come to fruition, as have Tim Barkley and Jeff Shore, who produced the physical iteration of these historical prints in a specific configuration that will allow the poetics of Baltrop’s images to shine. Don Quaintance of Public Address Design has once again shared his extraordinary talents by creating this beautiful catalogue while, Polly Koch skillfully edited the texts included here. In house, Cheryl Blissette provided much appreciated copy edits to ensure that this publication would hit is mark in providing a much needed resource on Alvin Baltrop to a greater audience. Thanks to all.

I would also like to thank our devoted crew of Perspectives gallery donors, who have given us the specific charge to use the downstairs galleries at the Museum to take curatorial chances and to stir the pot of Houston’s cultural life in ways that benefit the entire cultural ecosystem of this great art city.

Those that follow the international art press have been excited to learn that they will be among the first to see this crucial artist’s work in person and on this comprehensive scale, and they are ecstatic to share the thrill of artistic discovery with you.

Which returns us to the reasons why this is a “contemporary” exhibition. Clearly, Baltrop has a lot to say to the many

younger artists, like Ruby La Toya Frasier (whose Perspectives show will be at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston soon), who have returned to what is known as “documentary photography,” abandoning the postmodern retreat from depicting actual world situations for clearly constructed worlds. The real world is plenty interesting, and unresolved and strictly visual evidence can engage us in many ways that self-conscious fictions cannot.

We would also do well to consider the ways in which “contemporary” is appropriately a function of chronological time and in which ways that type of time-keeping is a useless limit that robs us of a richer experience of contemporary art, thought, and experience.

Perhaps most importantly, there is the issue of reception and how it needs to take as long as it takes. There are two parts to every artwork, the making and the receiving. Artists require that a thinking-feeling human being responds to the work to create the art experience.

In Holland Cotter’s review of Baltrop’s SoHo show in the New York Times, he wrote, “The pictures went all but unseen during Mr. Baltrop’s lifetime. The art world didn’t know what to do with work on an unorthodox subject by a black, bisexual photographer, so did nothing; and in the wake of AIDS, a historical veil was drawn over the ‘sex piers’ phenomenon.”

Artists produce work, but they cannot control how long it takes the world of art consumers to deal with their provocations. Baltrop may have made these images years ago, but they have not been absorbed by the mainstream yet. Over the last five years, the process has begun. Perhaps at the end of this show and the distribution of this publication, Baltrop can begin to seem like the historical figure he should have been.

But for now this work is too fresh, dangerous, and undigested to be anything but contemporary art.

Bill Arning Director Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

pages 8–9: Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with two men), 1975–86

7

FOREWORD

T

he Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is proud to present Perspectives 179—Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass. Baltrop was a preternaturally observant and poetic photographer who died of cancer in 2004 at fifty-five years old, which brings up the marvelously thorny issue of how photographs made decades ago could be considered “contemporary.”

Because the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is first and foremost a contemporary venue, most of the time we show artists whose futures are likely much longer than their pasts, promising artists whose best years we believe are ahead of them. When we feel strongly that an artist who is no longer living needs an exhibition, we have to ask ourselves the very tough question of “why?”

When Baltrop’s work came up in my regular—and always fascinating— discussions about potential future programming with CAMH’s Senior Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, we were both enthusiastic about bringing his work to the Museum. We shared memorable recent first encounters with his work that had profoundly affected us, and we were shocked that his photographs—memorably conceived and executed, with a poet’s eye for resonant details—had remained unseen as long as they had. Clearly, letting viewers see this work was an imperative for us.

I first learned about Alvin Baltrop’s work when I attended a lecture by Douglas Crimp at Harvard University in 2007, where he presented a chapter from his memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s. Crimp has been an intellectual hero of mine and an inspiration since I started in the field, so this was an exciting night for me. His observations about art world politics and the prejudices of that period were priceless, witty, and a corrective to the notion that only one type of work was being made during those times.

Most crucially, Crimp explicated how the socioeconomic conditions of a depressed New York City in the seventies allowed for space abandoned by industry to be claimed by renegade artists as well as gay men, groups with whom he was affiliated. He showed recently discovered images by Baltrop of the late artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End (1975), a classic elegant sculpture cut into an abandoned pier on the Hudson River near Greenwich Village.

6

The piers had been discovered years earlier as an ideal cruising space for the first generation of gay men to experience the uncorking of desire that occurred culture-wide in the late sixties. It allowed them to form ever larger, if still underground, communities in new ways. While dangerous and decrepit, the piers were an exciting hunting ground for sex partners, friends, and lovers, an insanely democratic experiment allowing classes and races to mix in unprecedented ways. Baltrop, as a Black man, might not have been able to photograph freely in most of the emerging gay venues of the period, but at the piers he could.

The mid-seventies, in both art history and the history of alternative sexualities, is a uniquely romantic and problematic period. Artists of the Minimalist and Post-Minimalist era like Gordon Matta-Clark have been called non-ironically members of “the greatest generation,” and spaces like DIA:Beacon in Beacon, New York, are essentially pilgrimage sites where visitors genuflect before icons of this legacy installed in their most perfect form. For gay men, the period between Stonewall and the appearance of AIDS was a similar golden age, a time in which a radical rethinking of the possibilities of existence as fully embodied, uninhibited, sexual, and romantic beings was being explored for the first time.

Crimp had inhabited that space in his capacity both as an art critic and as a participant in the cruising rites of early liberation, so the images served as a perfect point of departure for reconsidering the multiple worlds he has negotiated in his long career. That these photographs survived and were now available for a younger generation to view was a miracle. That markers of the golden ages of both postwar sculpture and radical sociosexual change could have been recorded on the same negative was too good to be true.

Baltrop’s photographs of anonymous sex were the catalyst for a swelling of new interest in his work. We art world mavens quickly discovered, and conveyed in a slew of articles and exhibitions, that Baltrop had been a classic documentary photographer from his earliest years, taking pictures in the Navy. Crimp soon published an essay on Baltrop’s work in Artforum, with the artist’s image on the cover of the issue.

Crimp again wrote on Baltrop for Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present,

presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Third Streaming in SoHo then mounted a major show of Baltrop’s work, which received glowing press in Artforum and the New York Times.

Douglas Crimp, Third Streaming’s Yona Backer, and Randal Wilcox—Baltrop’s friend and the person who has devoted himself to preserving Baltrop’s legacy—have been crucial in making this project a reality, and for that we are very grateful.

Senior Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver is acknowledged as among the world’s leading scholars on the work of artists of African descent, and her scholarship on Baltrop continues in her award-winning tradition of bringing artists into the mainstream dialogue who should have been there all along, but were not. Her team in CAMH’s Curatorial Department, Dean Daderko and Nancy O’Connor, are united in their vision of art as an endeavor that changes lives and engages people.

They have helped this project come to fruition, as have Tim Barkley and Jeff Shore, who produced the physical iteration of these historical prints in a specific configuration that will allow the poetics of Baltrop’s images to shine. Don Quaintance of Public Address Design has once again shared his extraordinary talents by creating this beautiful catalogue while, Polly Koch skillfully edited the texts included here. In house, Cheryl Blissette provided much appreciated copy edits to ensure that this publication would hit is mark in providing a much needed resource on Alvin Baltrop to a greater audience. Thanks to all.

I would also like to thank our devoted crew of Perspectives gallery donors, who have given us the specific charge to use the downstairs galleries at the Museum to take curatorial chances and to stir the pot of Houston’s cultural life in ways that benefit the entire cultural ecosystem of this great art city.

Those that follow the international art press have been excited to learn that they will be among the first to see this crucial artist’s work in person and on this comprehensive scale, and they are ecstatic to share the thrill of artistic discovery with you.

Which returns us to the reasons why this is a “contemporary” exhibition. Clearly, Baltrop has a lot to say to the many

younger artists, like Ruby La Toya Frasier (whose Perspectives show will be at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston soon), who have returned to what is known as “documentary photography,” abandoning the postmodern retreat from depicting actual world situations for clearly constructed worlds. The real world is plenty interesting, and unresolved and strictly visual evidence can engage us in many ways that self-conscious fictions cannot.

We would also do well to consider the ways in which “contemporary” is appropriately a function of chronological time and in which ways that type of time-keeping is a useless limit that robs us of a richer experience of contemporary art, thought, and experience.

Perhaps most importantly, there is the issue of reception and how it needs to take as long as it takes. There are two parts to every artwork, the making and the receiving. Artists require that a thinking-feeling human being responds to the work to create the art experience.

In Holland Cotter’s review of Baltrop’s SoHo show in the New York Times, he wrote, “The pictures went all but unseen during Mr. Baltrop’s lifetime. The art world didn’t know what to do with work on an unorthodox subject by a black, bisexual photographer, so did nothing; and in the wake of AIDS, a historical veil was drawn over the ‘sex piers’ phenomenon.”

Artists produce work, but they cannot control how long it takes the world of art consumers to deal with their provocations. Baltrop may have made these images years ago, but they have not been absorbed by the mainstream yet. Over the last five years, the process has begun. Perhaps at the end of this show and the distribution of this publication, Baltrop can begin to seem like the historical figure he should have been.

But for now this work is too fresh, dangerous, and undigested to be anything but contemporary art.

Bill Arning Director Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

pages 8–9: Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with two men), 1975–86

7

8

9

8

9

PREFACE Douglas Crimp

A

memory from sometime in the mid-1970s: The summer day is hot and muggy. Rays of sunlight pour through gaps in the ceiling, each given tangible form by the dust particles flickering within—dust from the continuing disintegration of the roof that opens the pier shed to the sun in the first place. The place appears to be empty of other prowlers, which allows me to bask alone in the vastness and beauty of the ramshackle ruin. But my mood is anticipatory rather than contemplative. Soon I’ll climb the stairs to the former shipping offices, where I’m likely to find others, waiting or perhaps already engaged. I could be one of the lone figures cruising the piers, or on a different day one of the sunbathers lying on the uncovered dock that juts into the Hudson River, or even one of the faraway couples getting it on, all captured by Alvin Baltrop’s camera.

Baltrop’s photographs return us to a lost time as much as a lost place. New York City’s postwar transformation was suspended by the oil-shock recession, but to many of us the suspended state seemed to be simply the way New York was. Remnants of the city’s industrial era, not yet officially repurposed or demolished, were everywhere. There was no Hudson River Park, no High Line Park, no Chelsea Piers— for that matter, no Chelsea, if by “Chelsea” we mean the gay neighborhood of the 1980s, the art neighborhood of the 1990s, or the luxury-condo neighborhood of the present. Thanks to Baltrop, essential qualities of that earlier time survive.

We see in his photographs how unpoliced public spaces serve shared desires, showing as they do myriad sex acts taking place amidst the magnificent dilapidation of the Hudson River piers. Sometimes Baltrop positioned himself

at a great distance from his subjects, who were probably oblivious of the fact that he was taking their picture. Other times he was not only up close but clearly part of a scenario in which players posed or performed explicitly for his camera. Either way, you don’t feel that Baltrop’s project was documentary in nature (except when he photographed an intrusion on the scene, such as a fire). Baltrop was himself a denizen of the piers, immersed in the scene. He searched out the piers’ secret places and befriended the people who hung out there. He knew how to get a good view of the adjacent pier or into the next room, part of the warren of former offices.

Many of Baltrop’s perspectives are from high up, almost bird’seye views. He wrote of using a makeshift harness to get some pictures. (It is interesting to compare Baltrop’s Navy shipboard photographs to those taken later at the piers; they, too, include both faraway shots of men on the deck, taken from a high perspective, and the most intimate of close-ups below deck— one shows a shipmate masturbating.)

Baltrop’s Hudson River pier photographs afford viewers a crucial lesson in how personal space was made public in the queer scene of the 1970s. Sex was contingent on neither privacy nor knowing your partners. Acts and expressions of the utmost intimacy took place among strangers who met in a public arena—and they could therefore be witnessed, whether from a distance or right up close, by someone who was also a stranger but might become an intimate, too. The striking casualness with which all of this took place and the frankness that made it available to Baltrop’s camera make these photographs deeply moving records. Of course, there were terrifying dangers and appalling acts of violence at the piers, and Baltrop didn’t shy away from showing them, but withal it is the newly liberated spirit that is most palpable.

Friend (The Piers), 1977

10

11

PREFACE Douglas Crimp

A

memory from sometime in the mid-1970s: The summer day is hot and muggy. Rays of sunlight pour through gaps in the ceiling, each given tangible form by the dust particles flickering within—dust from the continuing disintegration of the roof that opens the pier shed to the sun in the first place. The place appears to be empty of other prowlers, which allows me to bask alone in the vastness and beauty of the ramshackle ruin. But my mood is anticipatory rather than contemplative. Soon I’ll climb the stairs to the former shipping offices, where I’m likely to find others, waiting or perhaps already engaged. I could be one of the lone figures cruising the piers, or on a different day one of the sunbathers lying on the uncovered dock that juts into the Hudson River, or even one of the faraway couples getting it on, all captured by Alvin Baltrop’s camera.

Baltrop’s photographs return us to a lost time as much as a lost place. New York City’s postwar transformation was suspended by the oil-shock recession, but to many of us the suspended state seemed to be simply the way New York was. Remnants of the city’s industrial era, not yet officially repurposed or demolished, were everywhere. There was no Hudson River Park, no High Line Park, no Chelsea Piers— for that matter, no Chelsea, if by “Chelsea” we mean the gay neighborhood of the 1980s, the art neighborhood of the 1990s, or the luxury-condo neighborhood of the present. Thanks to Baltrop, essential qualities of that earlier time survive.

We see in his photographs how unpoliced public spaces serve shared desires, showing as they do myriad sex acts taking place amidst the magnificent dilapidation of the Hudson River piers. Sometimes Baltrop positioned himself

at a great distance from his subjects, who were probably oblivious of the fact that he was taking their picture. Other times he was not only up close but clearly part of a scenario in which players posed or performed explicitly for his camera. Either way, you don’t feel that Baltrop’s project was documentary in nature (except when he photographed an intrusion on the scene, such as a fire). Baltrop was himself a denizen of the piers, immersed in the scene. He searched out the piers’ secret places and befriended the people who hung out there. He knew how to get a good view of the adjacent pier or into the next room, part of the warren of former offices.

Many of Baltrop’s perspectives are from high up, almost bird’seye views. He wrote of using a makeshift harness to get some pictures. (It is interesting to compare Baltrop’s Navy shipboard photographs to those taken later at the piers; they, too, include both faraway shots of men on the deck, taken from a high perspective, and the most intimate of close-ups below deck— one shows a shipmate masturbating.)

Baltrop’s Hudson River pier photographs afford viewers a crucial lesson in how personal space was made public in the queer scene of the 1970s. Sex was contingent on neither privacy nor knowing your partners. Acts and expressions of the utmost intimacy took place among strangers who met in a public arena—and they could therefore be witnessed, whether from a distance or right up close, by someone who was also a stranger but might become an intimate, too. The striking casualness with which all of this took place and the frankness that made it available to Baltrop’s camera make these photographs deeply moving records. Of course, there were terrifying dangers and appalling acts of violence at the piers, and Baltrop didn’t shy away from showing them, but withal it is the newly liberated spirit that is most palpable.

Friend (The Piers), 1977

10

11

ALVIN BALTROP: DREAMS INTO GLASS Valerie Cassel Oliver

T

“In the dark we all can be free”

he earliest known Alvin Baltrop photograph, The Cloisters (Fort Tryon Park, NYC) (1965), depicts a solitary woman seated in the shadows before a large glass window that is infused with light. The artist was just seventeen and already experimenting with the twin-lens Yashica camera an uncle had given him. Some seven years later, Baltrop would draw upon this composition and its tension between cast light and consuming shadow to create his most recognized body of work, a series of photographs taken at the abandoned West Side piers located along the Hudson River in New York.

Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1948, Baltrop died from cancer in 2004 at a Manhattan hospital at the age of fiftyfive. His last photographs, dated 2003, were taken while he was in hospice. What lies in between that 1965 photograph at The Cloisters and his last self-portrait in 2003 are around a thousand vintage and duplicate prints, contact sheets, and negatives, as well as a wellspring of archival material. This posthumous exhibition features but a fraction of what Baltrop produced during his lifetime, but it still points to the breadth of his work, moving from classical black and white to tone-ontone color photography.

Coming of age in the 1960s, Baltrop was aware of the seismic cultural, political, and social shifts taking place around him. Civil rights and women’s rights were raising the consciousness of the nation. The United States’ involvement in the war in Vietnam only served to intensify a widening generational divide between parents that supported the war and their children that rallied against it. And the sexual revolution was expanding beyond the infamous “Summer of Love” in the San Francisco Bay Area to reach New York, where in 1969 a routine police raid on Stonewall Inn—a Greenwich Village drinking establishment frequented by homosexuals, lesbians, and drag queens—sparked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. Despite the sexual revolution, homosexuality remained widely detested and viewed less as a legitimate self-determination of one’s sexual orientation and more as a pathology from which one could be cured.

Seminal moments like this would go on to play a pivotal role in the artist’s life. His early works (1965–68) offer evidence that as a Bronx teenager Baltrop traveled extensively around Manhattan taking photographs; he even frequented the West Village and Stonewall Inn.1 During that period, he undertook no formal study in photography, but was mentored by older photographers who befriended him. Baltrop also absorbed the photography collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which featured the work of American, European, and Japanese photographers. Modernist photographers seemed especially influential on Baltrop’s initial practice: what survives of this early work is reminiscent of the diverse styles of documentary street photography of Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Berenice Abbott, or Helen Levitt.

Also present among these works are two self-portraits (c. 1966–67) that serve as a prologue to the future trajectory of Baltrop’s interest, going beyond the streets he first photographed. The self-portraits show a nude Baltrop posing with a towel hung from one shoulder. Photographing himself in recto and verso, Baltrop clearly gave thought to the composition and scale of the image, thus projecting a sense of voyeuristic intimacy—the artist’s own glimpse of himself. The setting was most likely Baltrop’s own bedroom, as indicated by the rolls of film resting on the dresser. Invited into a private moment, we witness the artist in an act of willful transgression. Raised in a single-parent home with his older brother, James, he was often in conflict with the restrictive religious doctrines of his mother, Dorothy Mae Baltrop, who was a devout Jehovah’s Witness.2 The strategically torn paper on the recto self-portrait—just above the temple to create a horn-like protrusion— provides a glimpse into Baltrop’s mischievous nature.

Not long after he took these photographs, Baltrop enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he served as a medic from 1969 to 1972. He brought with him his camera ostensibly to create a visual diary of his life aboard the vessel, though the substantial body of work preserved from this period reveals the artist’s growing articulation and evolution of his art. With equal aplomb, Baltrop made himself and his camera privy to the intimate moments as well as the very public routine of his fellow servicemen. The artist revealed both the complexity of life

Super Cream, 1980 12

13

ALVIN BALTROP: DREAMS INTO GLASS Valerie Cassel Oliver

T

“In the dark we all can be free”

he earliest known Alvin Baltrop photograph, The Cloisters (Fort Tryon Park, NYC) (1965), depicts a solitary woman seated in the shadows before a large glass window that is infused with light. The artist was just seventeen and already experimenting with the twin-lens Yashica camera an uncle had given him. Some seven years later, Baltrop would draw upon this composition and its tension between cast light and consuming shadow to create his most recognized body of work, a series of photographs taken at the abandoned West Side piers located along the Hudson River in New York.

Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1948, Baltrop died from cancer in 2004 at a Manhattan hospital at the age of fiftyfive. His last photographs, dated 2003, were taken while he was in hospice. What lies in between that 1965 photograph at The Cloisters and his last self-portrait in 2003 are around a thousand vintage and duplicate prints, contact sheets, and negatives, as well as a wellspring of archival material. This posthumous exhibition features but a fraction of what Baltrop produced during his lifetime, but it still points to the breadth of his work, moving from classical black and white to tone-ontone color photography.

Coming of age in the 1960s, Baltrop was aware of the seismic cultural, political, and social shifts taking place around him. Civil rights and women’s rights were raising the consciousness of the nation. The United States’ involvement in the war in Vietnam only served to intensify a widening generational divide between parents that supported the war and their children that rallied against it. And the sexual revolution was expanding beyond the infamous “Summer of Love” in the San Francisco Bay Area to reach New York, where in 1969 a routine police raid on Stonewall Inn—a Greenwich Village drinking establishment frequented by homosexuals, lesbians, and drag queens—sparked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. Despite the sexual revolution, homosexuality remained widely detested and viewed less as a legitimate self-determination of one’s sexual orientation and more as a pathology from which one could be cured.

Seminal moments like this would go on to play a pivotal role in the artist’s life. His early works (1965–68) offer evidence that as a Bronx teenager Baltrop traveled extensively around Manhattan taking photographs; he even frequented the West Village and Stonewall Inn.1 During that period, he undertook no formal study in photography, but was mentored by older photographers who befriended him. Baltrop also absorbed the photography collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which featured the work of American, European, and Japanese photographers. Modernist photographers seemed especially influential on Baltrop’s initial practice: what survives of this early work is reminiscent of the diverse styles of documentary street photography of Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Berenice Abbott, or Helen Levitt.

Also present among these works are two self-portraits (c. 1966–67) that serve as a prologue to the future trajectory of Baltrop’s interest, going beyond the streets he first photographed. The self-portraits show a nude Baltrop posing with a towel hung from one shoulder. Photographing himself in recto and verso, Baltrop clearly gave thought to the composition and scale of the image, thus projecting a sense of voyeuristic intimacy—the artist’s own glimpse of himself. The setting was most likely Baltrop’s own bedroom, as indicated by the rolls of film resting on the dresser. Invited into a private moment, we witness the artist in an act of willful transgression. Raised in a single-parent home with his older brother, James, he was often in conflict with the restrictive religious doctrines of his mother, Dorothy Mae Baltrop, who was a devout Jehovah’s Witness.2 The strategically torn paper on the recto self-portrait—just above the temple to create a horn-like protrusion— provides a glimpse into Baltrop’s mischievous nature.

Not long after he took these photographs, Baltrop enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he served as a medic from 1969 to 1972. He brought with him his camera ostensibly to create a visual diary of his life aboard the vessel, though the substantial body of work preserved from this period reveals the artist’s growing articulation and evolution of his art. With equal aplomb, Baltrop made himself and his camera privy to the intimate moments as well as the very public routine of his fellow servicemen. The artist revealed both the complexity of life

Super Cream, 1980 12

13

aboard the naval vessel—the homo-societal environment— and his own sexual desire for and among other men.

The essay’s epigraph, “in the dark we are all free,” is attributed to Baltrop. He was keenly aware of the nuances of sexual liberation, particularly as it pertained to homosexuality. Correspondence between Baltrop and his mother substantiates the fact that the artist was very open about his sexual desires. Baltrop’s encounters in the Navy, however unsanctioned by the military institution, would yield lasting friendships, though the political implication of the artist as Black, male, and bisexual included a strong likelihood of being ostracized from his own personal and communal family (even more so than white gay or bisexual men). For Black men, the homosexual world carried deep-seated tensions and were considered by some in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements antithetical to the survival of the race. Yet, it is during this period that Baltrop would come into his own, developing a particular aesthetic around the stark gaze of his subjects and the photographing of images almost obliterated by an intense light or submerged in deep shadow.

In regard to the latter, Baltrop was aware of Max Waldman’s work (a dog-eared copy of Waldman on Theatre was found in the artist’s archives). No doubt Waldman’s extraordinary images left an indelible impression upon the artist, as did the early dark tonal qualities of many postwar Japanese photographers. Baltrop would continue to create texture with a palette of light and shadow for much of the decade that followed. At the same time he began experimenting with the abstracted body as subject and form. His tightly cropped compositions of hips, buttocks, and penises balance high contrasting images with strong compositions. The artist would reprint negatives until he achieved the texture and emotional tenor he sought, employing this method in the next series of photographs he began after his honorable discharge from the Navy.

By 1972, Baltrop was again living with his mother and brother in their small apartment in the Bronx and roaming the streets of New York City, photographing the innumerable and fleeting moments of a city in transition. Decaying buildings yielded themselves to Baltrop’s camera, as did the shifting population of the city’s inhabitants. Using his military benefits under the G.I. bill, Baltrop enrolled at the School of the Visual Arts. Although he did not graduate, this period offered the artist an unprecedented period of meditation on the practice of photography.

It was at this time, while working as a taxi driver, that Baltrop began photographing the piers, the series of crumbling buildings along the Hudson River on the city’s West 14

Side. He soon became fascinated with the piers and those who frequented the abandoned warehouses adjoining them— gays cruising (roaming the piers in search of anonymous sex), prostitutes, runaways, artists, and criminals. For over a decade, he committed himself to photographing the complex of dilapidated buildings that extended from Tribeca to West 59th Street. The intensity of Baltrop’s engagement was staggering, bordering upon the obsessive. Monitoring his taxi’s dispatch radio for the police frequency, he often emerged, like Weegee, on fresh crime scenes to capture a picture with journalistic immediacy such as the drowning victim seen in In the family (The Piers) (1975–86). Baltrop eventually quit his job as a taxi driver, purchased a van, and advertised his services as a mover, all of which enabled him to spend unprecedented time at the piers: with food supplies and a change of clothing in the back, Baltrop would spend days, if not weeks, along the river.

His commitment was serious. The artist once divulged to his then assistant Randal Wilcox that he had “constructed a harness that allowed him to hang from the rafters and pursue his clandestine shooting with great accuracy and precision.”3 But Baltrop’s forays were not all so unabashedly voyeuristic.

Over the decade that he shot the piers, the artist befriended many of its residents and frequent visitors—sunbathers, hustlers, cruisers, and artists. He created their portraits with such authenticity and empathy that their gazes are wide open, neither defiant nor shielded. They see in Baltrop what he sees in them. There is no judgment, no resistance, nor a need to justify their existence.

In other images, however, the subjects avert their eyes or look away from the camera, as if to remain anonymous. It was this ambivalence in early gay life that Baltrop knowingly probed. In the aftermath of the Stonewall riots and before the advent of GRIDS (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome, later known as the pandemic AIDS) bloomed the heyday of gay sexual liberation. It was not uncommon for well-heeled executives from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to cruise the piers alongside men from the economically depressed neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The piers became the catalyst that imploded the social and economic hierarchies of the time.

They represented the ultimate democratization of sexual desire, and Baltrop knew that this moment was extraordinary, yet ephemeral.

He shot thousands of images of the piers—interiors and exteriors, the exuberance of sexual encounters and the unexpected tragedies—against a backdrop that also included the area’s conceptual and public art. Most prevalent in Baltrop’s photographs are the monumental works of Gordon

Self-Portrait, October 2003, 2003

Matta-Clark, muralist Tava (Gustav von Will), and David Wojnarowicz, though many more artists would draw upon the inspiration and energy of the piers’ “architecture as a breathing ruin.” 4 Yet as the AIDS pandemic gripped the country in the early eighties, New York began systematically closing or demolishing areas of “potential contagion.” By 1985, the dilapidated structures along the piers had been torn down, despite efforts by Baltrop and a few other organized groups to save them. Once they were gone, Baltrop turned to maintaining his many photographs and recordings (he had begun collecting oral histories from those living or cruising along the piers) as a means to preserve the significance of the lost era.

Artistically and emotionally spent, Baltrop shot fewer and fewer photographs in the ensuing years, during which he became an advocate for those living with HIV/AIDS. In the 1990s, as he turned his attention to the wealth of images that he had recorded on film over the past twenty years, he began experimenting with color—either printing works previously shot in color or creating new works. Street scenes, such as Street Scene (tossing basketball) (1974), are infused with deep, vibrant, saturated tones. In the photograph, with a mustardyellow building in the background, a turquoise car passes by as a brown basketball hovers in mid-flight and a young girl turns the corner in a flamingo-pink dess. Baltrop also began experimenting with both 35mm slide and print film (a cache of these images are featured in the exhibition on a mounted slide projector). But Baltrop’s newfound preoccupation brought the artist little comfort as he came up against a profound resistance on the part of galleries to exhibit his work, especially the substantial body of photographs he had created at the piers. To many, he was seen as an outsider who, in revealing the realities of gay sexual abandon in the years that preceded

AIDS, had exposed an ugly truth that some feared would substantiate the public’s prejudice against those infected in the pandemic. As the art world became increasingly antagonistic toward him, Baltrop gradually withdrew from showing his work; during his lifetime, he would exhibit his photographs only a handful of times.

These later years marked a downturn in Baltrop’s life.

In addition to the countless men, women, and transvestites that Baltrop knew who became afflicted with the disease and died, the artist also lost his mother, his lover, Mark, and his brother, James, with whom he was very close and who had inspired him to become an artist.5 Baltrop was devastated by these losses, but remained defiant. He knew that what he had created was significant and needed to be preserved, so he employed a young artist to help him sort through and organize his numerous archives. Then Baltrop’s health began failing, and by 2003 he was hospitalized with terminal cancer. In the hospital, Baltrop did what he had always done: document the world around him. His last photographs from this period— less saturated and more esoteric, as if making visible the transitory nature of things—are a poetic yet powerful return to where he began: with a self-portrait in the mirror and a seated woman bathed in light.

Thanks to the commitment of that studio assistant, Randal Wilcox, Baltrop’s work has been brought from the abyss of obscurity and into a radiant future. As for Baltrop, the immediacy of his work resonates even today as we deconstruct the aftermath of those years that would later define our contemporary lives. Baltrop stands among other artists in that pivotal time whose voices and images have endured as an unadulturated and honest echo of what we were.

Notes 1. Randal Wilcox, interview with Baltrop, December 21, 2002.

2. Wilcox indicates that Baltrop’s mother destroyed many of his early photographs that featured Malcolm X and additional nude photos of Baltrop and his friends.

3. See Randal Wilcox, “The History That Alvin Baltrop Left Behind,” Atlántica: Journal of Art and Thought, no. 52 (Spring/Summer 2012): pp.

116–39.

4. Noah Khoshbin, “The Work of Alvin Baltrop,” Art Wednesday (2011): pp. 44–56.

5. He and James had often collaborated in the creation of postcards, pins, and buttons that they sold on 125th Street in Harlem.

15

aboard the naval vessel—the homo-societal environment— and his own sexual desire for and among other men.

The essay’s epigraph, “in the dark we are all free,” is attributed to Baltrop. He was keenly aware of the nuances of sexual liberation, particularly as it pertained to homosexuality. Correspondence between Baltrop and his mother substantiates the fact that the artist was very open about his sexual desires. Baltrop’s encounters in the Navy, however unsanctioned by the military institution, would yield lasting friendships, though the political implication of the artist as Black, male, and bisexual included a strong likelihood of being ostracized from his own personal and communal family (even more so than white gay or bisexual men). For Black men, the homosexual world carried deep-seated tensions and were considered by some in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements antithetical to the survival of the race. Yet, it is during this period that Baltrop would come into his own, developing a particular aesthetic around the stark gaze of his subjects and the photographing of images almost obliterated by an intense light or submerged in deep shadow.

In regard to the latter, Baltrop was aware of Max Waldman’s work (a dog-eared copy of Waldman on Theatre was found in the artist’s archives). No doubt Waldman’s extraordinary images left an indelible impression upon the artist, as did the early dark tonal qualities of many postwar Japanese photographers. Baltrop would continue to create texture with a palette of light and shadow for much of the decade that followed. At the same time he began experimenting with the abstracted body as subject and form. His tightly cropped compositions of hips, buttocks, and penises balance high contrasting images with strong compositions. The artist would reprint negatives until he achieved the texture and emotional tenor he sought, employing this method in the next series of photographs he began after his honorable discharge from the Navy.

By 1972, Baltrop was again living with his mother and brother in their small apartment in the Bronx and roaming the streets of New York City, photographing the innumerable and fleeting moments of a city in transition. Decaying buildings yielded themselves to Baltrop’s camera, as did the shifting population of the city’s inhabitants. Using his military benefits under the G.I. bill, Baltrop enrolled at the School of the Visual Arts. Although he did not graduate, this period offered the artist an unprecedented period of meditation on the practice of photography.

It was at this time, while working as a taxi driver, that Baltrop began photographing the piers, the series of crumbling buildings along the Hudson River on the city’s West 14

Side. He soon became fascinated with the piers and those who frequented the abandoned warehouses adjoining them— gays cruising (roaming the piers in search of anonymous sex), prostitutes, runaways, artists, and criminals. For over a decade, he committed himself to photographing the complex of dilapidated buildings that extended from Tribeca to West 59th Street. The intensity of Baltrop’s engagement was staggering, bordering upon the obsessive. Monitoring his taxi’s dispatch radio for the police frequency, he often emerged, like Weegee, on fresh crime scenes to capture a picture with journalistic immediacy such as the drowning victim seen in In the family (The Piers) (1975–86). Baltrop eventually quit his job as a taxi driver, purchased a van, and advertised his services as a mover, all of which enabled him to spend unprecedented time at the piers: with food supplies and a change of clothing in the back, Baltrop would spend days, if not weeks, along the river.

His commitment was serious. The artist once divulged to his then assistant Randal Wilcox that he had “constructed a harness that allowed him to hang from the rafters and pursue his clandestine shooting with great accuracy and precision.”3 But Baltrop’s forays were not all so unabashedly voyeuristic.

Over the decade that he shot the piers, the artist befriended many of its residents and frequent visitors—sunbathers, hustlers, cruisers, and artists. He created their portraits with such authenticity and empathy that their gazes are wide open, neither defiant nor shielded. They see in Baltrop what he sees in them. There is no judgment, no resistance, nor a need to justify their existence.

In other images, however, the subjects avert their eyes or look away from the camera, as if to remain anonymous. It was this ambivalence in early gay life that Baltrop knowingly probed. In the aftermath of the Stonewall riots and before the advent of GRIDS (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome, later known as the pandemic AIDS) bloomed the heyday of gay sexual liberation. It was not uncommon for well-heeled executives from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to cruise the piers alongside men from the economically depressed neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The piers became the catalyst that imploded the social and economic hierarchies of the time.

They represented the ultimate democratization of sexual desire, and Baltrop knew that this moment was extraordinary, yet ephemeral.

He shot thousands of images of the piers—interiors and exteriors, the exuberance of sexual encounters and the unexpected tragedies—against a backdrop that also included the area’s conceptual and public art. Most prevalent in Baltrop’s photographs are the monumental works of Gordon

Self-Portrait, October 2003, 2003

Matta-Clark, muralist Tava (Gustav von Will), and David Wojnarowicz, though many more artists would draw upon the inspiration and energy of the piers’ “architecture as a breathing ruin.” 4 Yet as the AIDS pandemic gripped the country in the early eighties, New York began systematically closing or demolishing areas of “potential contagion.” By 1985, the dilapidated structures along the piers had been torn down, despite efforts by Baltrop and a few other organized groups to save them. Once they were gone, Baltrop turned to maintaining his many photographs and recordings (he had begun collecting oral histories from those living or cruising along the piers) as a means to preserve the significance of the lost era.

Artistically and emotionally spent, Baltrop shot fewer and fewer photographs in the ensuing years, during which he became an advocate for those living with HIV/AIDS. In the 1990s, as he turned his attention to the wealth of images that he had recorded on film over the past twenty years, he began experimenting with color—either printing works previously shot in color or creating new works. Street scenes, such as Street Scene (tossing basketball) (1974), are infused with deep, vibrant, saturated tones. In the photograph, with a mustardyellow building in the background, a turquoise car passes by as a brown basketball hovers in mid-flight and a young girl turns the corner in a flamingo-pink dess. Baltrop also began experimenting with both 35mm slide and print film (a cache of these images are featured in the exhibition on a mounted slide projector). But Baltrop’s newfound preoccupation brought the artist little comfort as he came up against a profound resistance on the part of galleries to exhibit his work, especially the substantial body of photographs he had created at the piers. To many, he was seen as an outsider who, in revealing the realities of gay sexual abandon in the years that preceded

AIDS, had exposed an ugly truth that some feared would substantiate the public’s prejudice against those infected in the pandemic. As the art world became increasingly antagonistic toward him, Baltrop gradually withdrew from showing his work; during his lifetime, he would exhibit his photographs only a handful of times.

These later years marked a downturn in Baltrop’s life.

In addition to the countless men, women, and transvestites that Baltrop knew who became afflicted with the disease and died, the artist also lost his mother, his lover, Mark, and his brother, James, with whom he was very close and who had inspired him to become an artist.5 Baltrop was devastated by these losses, but remained defiant. He knew that what he had created was significant and needed to be preserved, so he employed a young artist to help him sort through and organize his numerous archives. Then Baltrop’s health began failing, and by 2003 he was hospitalized with terminal cancer. In the hospital, Baltrop did what he had always done: document the world around him. His last photographs from this period— less saturated and more esoteric, as if making visible the transitory nature of things—are a poetic yet powerful return to where he began: with a self-portrait in the mirror and a seated woman bathed in light.

Thanks to the commitment of that studio assistant, Randal Wilcox, Baltrop’s work has been brought from the abyss of obscurity and into a radiant future. As for Baltrop, the immediacy of his work resonates even today as we deconstruct the aftermath of those years that would later define our contemporary lives. Baltrop stands among other artists in that pivotal time whose voices and images have endured as an unadulturated and honest echo of what we were.

Notes 1. Randal Wilcox, interview with Baltrop, December 21, 2002.

2. Wilcox indicates that Baltrop’s mother destroyed many of his early photographs that featured Malcolm X and additional nude photos of Baltrop and his friends.

3. See Randal Wilcox, “The History That Alvin Baltrop Left Behind,” Atlántica: Journal of Art and Thought, no. 52 (Spring/Summer 2012): pp.

116–39.

4. Noah Khoshbin, “The Work of Alvin Baltrop,” Art Wednesday (2011): pp. 44–56.

5. He and James had often collaborated in the creation of postcards, pins, and buttons that they sold on 125th Street in Harlem.

15

CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION

Navy (portrait of a man), 1969–72

16

Navy Ship, 1969–72

17

CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION

Navy (portrait of a man), 1969–72

16

Navy Ship, 1969–72

17

American Beauty (Navy), 1970

18

Navy Sailor (in his cabin), 1969–72 19

American Beauty (Navy), 1970

18

Navy Sailor (in his cabin), 1969–72 19

Navy Sailors, 1969–72

20

Navy (seated nude man), 1969–72 21

Navy Sailors, 1969–72

20

Navy (seated nude man), 1969–72 21

Missy (#1), 1972–75

22

Body, 1970–86

23

Missy (#1), 1972–75

22

Body, 1970–86

23

opposite: The Piers (open window), 1975–86

Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with nude man), 1975–86

24

pages 26–27: Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with man in sunlight), 1975–86

25

opposite: The Piers (open window), 1975–86

Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with nude man), 1975–86

24

pages 26–27: Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with man in sunlight), 1975–86

25

26

27

26

27

opposite: The Piers (Scumbag), 1975–86

The Piers (interior with two doorways), 1975–86

28

pages 30–31: Don’t let them see you (The Piers ), 1975–78

29

opposite: The Piers (Scumbag), 1975–86

The Piers (interior with two doorways), 1975–86

28

pages 30–31: Don’t let them see you (The Piers ), 1975–78

29

30

31

30

31

The Piers (man looking in window), 1972–86

32

In the family (The Piers), 1975–86 33

The Piers (man looking in window), 1972–86

32

In the family (The Piers), 1975–86 33

The Piers (man lying under sheet), 1975–86

34

The Piers (male portrait), 1975–86 35

The Piers (man lying under sheet), 1975–86

34

The Piers (male portrait), 1975–86 35

The Piers (two containers on the dock), 1975–86

36

The Piers (man in front of window), 1977

37

The Piers (two containers on the dock), 1975–86

36

The Piers (man in front of window), 1977

37

The Piers (arsonist climbing down fire escape ladder), 1975–86 The Piers (warehouse on fire with firemen), 1975–86

The Piers (firemen), 1975–86

38

pages 40–41: The Piers (three men on dock), 1975–86 39

The Piers (arsonist climbing down fire escape ladder), 1975–86 The Piers (warehouse on fire with firemen), 1975–86

The Piers (firemen), 1975–86

38

pages 40–41: The Piers (three men on dock), 1975–86 39

40

41

40

41

Shower Faucets, 1972–75

42

Missy (#2), 1972–75 43

Shower Faucets, 1972–75

42

Missy (#2), 1972–75 43

Female Prostitute (Bronx, NY), 1974–75

44

Untitled (Scumbag and anonymous woman having sex), 1975–86 45

Female Prostitute (Bronx, NY), 1974–75

44

Untitled (Scumbag and anonymous woman having sex), 1975–86 45

Female nude, 1974–80 Nude Woman with Jewelry, 1972–75

46

47

Female nude, 1974–80 Nude Woman with Jewelry, 1972–75

46

47

The Cloisters (Fort Tryon Park, NYC), 1965 Person Lying on the Grass, 1974–80

48

49

The Cloisters (Fort Tryon Park, NYC), 1965 Person Lying on the Grass, 1974–80

48

49

Man in Turquoise Coat, 1990

50

The Piers (person standing alone in West Street parking lot), 1975–86 51

Man in Turquoise Coat, 1990

50

The Piers (person standing alone in West Street parking lot), 1975–86 51

Woman Crossing Street, 1975–86 52

Street Scene (tossing basketball), 1974 53

Woman Crossing Street, 1975–86 52

Street Scene (tossing basketball), 1974 53

Three Chairs, 2003

54

Bingo, 2003–2011 55

Three Chairs, 2003

54

Bingo, 2003–2011 55

AFTERWORD Randal Wilcox

The only thing I’ve got is this film, man. This film is everything…. It’s my life, my story, and the story of people I have met and my friends…. Things that I desired, that I enjoyed. And people say, “Well, what does that mean to anybody?” And I say, “That means a lot to a lot of people.”

—Alvin Baltrop, December 21, 2002

A

lvin Baltrop belonged to a genus of artist that is swiftly becoming extinct. Producing a diaristic and deeply personal body of work is contrary to contemporary practice in an art world dominated by art that only functions as a commentary on other art or by art that is solely created as yet another commodity to be sold and traded to make the wealthy even wealthier. Baltrop’s commitment to fulfilling his own vision also places him outside of today’s allegedly liberal environment that will only consider, comprehend, and contextualize art according to the extremely arbitrary, outdated, and vague categories of gender, geography, race, and sexual preference. Prefacing an individual’s name with a brief generic description of his or her ancestry or sexual tastes may have been progressive once, but it has arguably reduced us all to viewing each other solely as types instead of as individual human beings with separate identities, opinions, thoughts, and emotions. These mental and psychic barriers have adversely affected how art is and is not perceived.

By choosing to engage in photography with none of these factors in mind, Alvin Baltrop created an idiosyncratic, aesthetically sophisticated, and historically significant body of work that is sui generis: a dual portrait of a man’s life and of a New York City that no longer exists. Fusing the humanistic concerns and documentary approach of the New York School with the existential outlook and stylized, high-contrast printing methods of postwar Japanese photography, Baltrop produced his own distinctive hybrid of classicism and film noir. One of his greatest strengths as a photographer was his employment of a refined aesthetic sensibility that did not eclipse the stark realities he sought to document. Mary Ellen Mark once observed, “If you get a couple of good pictures a year, you’re doing very well. It’s hard to get a great picture.

Really hard.”1 The photographs in Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass show that Baltrop shot hundreds of “great pictures.”

The exact number could realistically be in the thousands, as the photographer had the resources to produce only a few hundred prints throughout his brief life, and the archiving of thousands of unprinted negatives has only recently commenced.

When discussing a photograph that he shot through a fence, Baltrop remarked, “I am always on the outside looking in.” 2 He furthered his imposed outsider status using a technique he termed “practicing invisibility”: photographing in public with a camera hidden in a specially constructed shoulder bag. “You shut your mouth and you disappear.

‘Practice Invisibility’ and you will get the best shots. If they saw a camera in my hand, they would see what I was doing and act differently. I didn’t want that. Who looks at a Black man with a bag in his hand?” 3 Even now as Baltrop’s photography is receiving overdue recognition, his categorization as an outsider and a Black artist distorts the response to his work. Recently, a hedge fund trader—with admittedly no background in art or knowledge of art history—declined to purchase a set of vintage Baltrop prints because he felt the money he and his associates would spend would not be recouped, adding that the photographs were “only” the product of an “urban outsider artist.” And while some American museums have begun to collect work

by Black artists, this initiative is often a hollow gesture or a contrived, self-congratulatory response to the imperative for greater diversity, directed largely toward art made by recent college graduates. It is harder to get attention for earlier artists like Baltrop, whose work was for so long marginalized, misinterpreted, misunderstood, and ignored.

The subject matter of Baltrop’s pier photographs presented another hurdle to viewer reception. Judging by the responses they generated during his lifetime and posthumously, a lot of people have major issues when it comes to sex. Some are bothered by the slightest depiction of the act; others see sex in everything. On a certain level, the pier photographs function like a Rorschach test: although the images depict a range of subjects—architecture, art by other artists, crime scenes, portraits, and sex—for some viewers the sex is all that they see. The scant number of sex photographs is sadly the sole reason why people are interested in, or reticent to engage with, Baltrop’s work at all. The limited narrative of the piers

The Piers (portrait of transexual in front of motorcycle), 1975–86 56

57

AFTERWORD Randal Wilcox

The only thing I’ve got is this film, man. This film is everything…. It’s my life, my story, and the story of people I have met and my friends…. Things that I desired, that I enjoyed. And people say, “Well, what does that mean to anybody?” And I say, “That means a lot to a lot of people.”

—Alvin Baltrop, December 21, 2002

A

lvin Baltrop belonged to a genus of artist that is swiftly becoming extinct. Producing a diaristic and deeply personal body of work is contrary to contemporary practice in an art world dominated by art that only functions as a commentary on other art or by art that is solely created as yet another commodity to be sold and traded to make the wealthy even wealthier. Baltrop’s commitment to fulfilling his own vision also places him outside of today’s allegedly liberal environment that will only consider, comprehend, and contextualize art according to the extremely arbitrary, outdated, and vague categories of gender, geography, race, and sexual preference. Prefacing an individual’s name with a brief generic description of his or her ancestry or sexual tastes may have been progressive once, but it has arguably reduced us all to viewing each other solely as types instead of as individual human beings with separate identities, opinions, thoughts, and emotions. These mental and psychic barriers have adversely affected how art is and is not perceived.

By choosing to engage in photography with none of these factors in mind, Alvin Baltrop created an idiosyncratic, aesthetically sophisticated, and historically significant body of work that is sui generis: a dual portrait of a man’s life and of a New York City that no longer exists. Fusing the humanistic concerns and documentary approach of the New York School with the existential outlook and stylized, high-contrast printing methods of postwar Japanese photography, Baltrop produced his own distinctive hybrid of classicism and film noir. One of his greatest strengths as a photographer was his employment of a refined aesthetic sensibility that did not eclipse the stark realities he sought to document. Mary Ellen Mark once observed, “If you get a couple of good pictures a year, you’re doing very well. It’s hard to get a great picture.

Really hard.”1 The photographs in Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass show that Baltrop shot hundreds of “great pictures.”

The exact number could realistically be in the thousands, as the photographer had the resources to produce only a few hundred prints throughout his brief life, and the archiving of thousands of unprinted negatives has only recently commenced.

When discussing a photograph that he shot through a fence, Baltrop remarked, “I am always on the outside looking in.” 2 He furthered his imposed outsider status using a technique he termed “practicing invisibility”: photographing in public with a camera hidden in a specially constructed shoulder bag. “You shut your mouth and you disappear.

‘Practice Invisibility’ and you will get the best shots. If they saw a camera in my hand, they would see what I was doing and act differently. I didn’t want that. Who looks at a Black man with a bag in his hand?” 3 Even now as Baltrop’s photography is receiving overdue recognition, his categorization as an outsider and a Black artist distorts the response to his work. Recently, a hedge fund trader—with admittedly no background in art or knowledge of art history—declined to purchase a set of vintage Baltrop prints because he felt the money he and his associates would spend would not be recouped, adding that the photographs were “only” the product of an “urban outsider artist.” And while some American museums have begun to collect work

by Black artists, this initiative is often a hollow gesture or a contrived, self-congratulatory response to the imperative for greater diversity, directed largely toward art made by recent college graduates. It is harder to get attention for earlier artists like Baltrop, whose work was for so long marginalized, misinterpreted, misunderstood, and ignored.

The subject matter of Baltrop’s pier photographs presented another hurdle to viewer reception. Judging by the responses they generated during his lifetime and posthumously, a lot of people have major issues when it comes to sex. Some are bothered by the slightest depiction of the act; others see sex in everything. On a certain level, the pier photographs function like a Rorschach test: although the images depict a range of subjects—architecture, art by other artists, crime scenes, portraits, and sex—for some viewers the sex is all that they see. The scant number of sex photographs is sadly the sole reason why people are interested in, or reticent to engage with, Baltrop’s work at all. The limited narrative of the piers

The Piers (portrait of transexual in front of motorcycle), 1975–86 56

57

today (sex, art, and more sex) is fashioned by those who went there because they had a choice to. But many others went to the piers because they had nowhere else to go, and it was their stories that Baltrop largely related through his photographs: the stories of children abandoned by their parents, homeless men and women, the mentally ill, and those anonymous corpses who would regularly float to the surface of the Hudson River.

In a discussion about the piers, Emily Roysdon writes, “In the last few months as I engaged in a small interview project about the piers, I began thinking a lot of similar things.… I started the interviews asking a wide variety of questions, not too leading, trying to let people articulate the piers with their own vocabulary (but I was asking about political organizing, codes of behavior…), and I became increasingly disappointed. I realized that I wasn’t get[ting] what I was looking for. People only wanted to glorify the piers—the sex—and would only confirm the dominant narrative. I realized that just because people participated in a liberatory sex culture didn’t mean they had any politics. I was disappointed, and that’s what has led to this project.…

I want to think about the gap in the reality of the piers and the memorialization [of it] and how it is now. I’m interested in the piers as an unregulated public space, about the impossibility of imagining that in NYC now, and unpacking the free sex narrative that it occupies in queer history to think about it more complexly.” 4 The words of another diaristic, New York-based photographer fit in well with this view of Baltrop’s pier photographs. In the afterword to her book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin writes: “I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia couldn’t ever color my past….

I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could ever revise: not a safe, clean version, but instead, a record of what things really looked like and felt like…. A lot of the people in the book are dead now, mostly from AIDS….

AIDS changed everything…. [T]he book is now a volume of loss….” 5 Loss is a theme present throughout all of Baltrop’s work. Several of his friends died under tragic circumstances during his life, AIDS being only one of the ways that they perished. The photographs of Alice, Angel, Bibi, Lee, Mark,

Ray, and the countless anonymous individuals outside of and at the piers are the physical manifestations of Baltrop’s memories of these people and a record of their absence.

The pain of their loss sometimes made it difficult for him to look at his own work. “I can’t look at these photographs sometimes because of all the stories,” he said once. “There are so many stories.” 6 Alvin Baltrop had integrity as an artist and as a human being. This integrity can be found in the overall work and, more specifically, in an anecdote he related shortly before his death concerning a photograph that he was unable to shoot. While traveling home in a taxi after a chemotherapy treatment, Baltrop found himself stuck in traffic for a long period of time. Unrolling the car’s window, he asked a police officer what was causing the delay. The cop replied that someone had committed suicide in the middle of the street and that EMTs were busy dealing with the aftermath.

The photographer felt angry with himself that he had left his camera at home and wished that he had it with him so that he could show others what life can lead some people to do. After telling this story, Baltrop then added that this is why art exists: so that artists can communicate things that would otherwise remain unseen and forgotten.

Randal Wilcox is a Trustee of The Alvin Baltrop Trust New York, May 2012

Notes I am thankful to Valerie Cassel Oliver for giving this relevant artist his first, long-overdue museum survey. Additional thanks go to Yona Backer and Anna Stein of Third Streaming, Jonathan Berger, Michelle Branch, Whitney Browne, Tim Blue, Douglas Crimp, Allen Frame, Tom Gitterman, Amy Goldrich, David Jacobson, Noah Khoshbin, Emily Roysdon, and Elisabeth Sussman.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

“Mary Ellen Mark by Allen Frame,” BOMB 28 (Summer 1989).

Alvin Baltrop, interview with author, Spring 2003.

Ibid.

Emily Roysdon, email to author, July 19, 2010.

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York: Aperture, 1996), 145.

6. Alvin Baltrop, interview with author, December 21, 2002.

Alvin Baltrop’s Polaroid 450 and Ansco Panda Alvin Baltrop’s Twin-Lens Yashica-C camera Alvin Baltrop’s camera bag

58

59

today (sex, art, and more sex) is fashioned by those who went there because they had a choice to. But many others went to the piers because they had nowhere else to go, and it was their stories that Baltrop largely related through his photographs: the stories of children abandoned by their parents, homeless men and women, the mentally ill, and those anonymous corpses who would regularly float to the surface of the Hudson River.

In a discussion about the piers, Emily Roysdon writes, “In the last few months as I engaged in a small interview project about the piers, I began thinking a lot of similar things.… I started the interviews asking a wide variety of questions, not too leading, trying to let people articulate the piers with their own vocabulary (but I was asking about political organizing, codes of behavior…), and I became increasingly disappointed. I realized that I wasn’t get[ting] what I was looking for. People only wanted to glorify the piers—the sex—and would only confirm the dominant narrative. I realized that just because people participated in a liberatory sex culture didn’t mean they had any politics. I was disappointed, and that’s what has led to this project.…

I want to think about the gap in the reality of the piers and the memorialization [of it] and how it is now. I’m interested in the piers as an unregulated public space, about the impossibility of imagining that in NYC now, and unpacking the free sex narrative that it occupies in queer history to think about it more complexly.” 4 The words of another diaristic, New York-based photographer fit in well with this view of Baltrop’s pier photographs. In the afterword to her book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin writes: “I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia couldn’t ever color my past….

I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could ever revise: not a safe, clean version, but instead, a record of what things really looked like and felt like…. A lot of the people in the book are dead now, mostly from AIDS….

AIDS changed everything…. [T]he book is now a volume of loss….” 5 Loss is a theme present throughout all of Baltrop’s work. Several of his friends died under tragic circumstances during his life, AIDS being only one of the ways that they perished. The photographs of Alice, Angel, Bibi, Lee, Mark,

Ray, and the countless anonymous individuals outside of and at the piers are the physical manifestations of Baltrop’s memories of these people and a record of their absence.

The pain of their loss sometimes made it difficult for him to look at his own work. “I can’t look at these photographs sometimes because of all the stories,” he said once. “There are so many stories.” 6 Alvin Baltrop had integrity as an artist and as a human being. This integrity can be found in the overall work and, more specifically, in an anecdote he related shortly before his death concerning a photograph that he was unable to shoot. While traveling home in a taxi after a chemotherapy treatment, Baltrop found himself stuck in traffic for a long period of time. Unrolling the car’s window, he asked a police officer what was causing the delay. The cop replied that someone had committed suicide in the middle of the street and that EMTs were busy dealing with the aftermath.

The photographer felt angry with himself that he had left his camera at home and wished that he had it with him so that he could show others what life can lead some people to do. After telling this story, Baltrop then added that this is why art exists: so that artists can communicate things that would otherwise remain unseen and forgotten.

Randal Wilcox is a Trustee of The Alvin Baltrop Trust New York, May 2012

Notes I am thankful to Valerie Cassel Oliver for giving this relevant artist his first, long-overdue museum survey. Additional thanks go to Yona Backer and Anna Stein of Third Streaming, Jonathan Berger, Michelle Branch, Whitney Browne, Tim Blue, Douglas Crimp, Allen Frame, Tom Gitterman, Amy Goldrich, David Jacobson, Noah Khoshbin, Emily Roysdon, and Elisabeth Sussman.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

“Mary Ellen Mark by Allen Frame,” BOMB 28 (Summer 1989).

Alvin Baltrop, interview with author, Spring 2003.

Ibid.

Emily Roysdon, email to author, July 19, 2010.

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York: Aperture, 1996), 145.

6. Alvin Baltrop, interview with author, December 21, 2002.

Alvin Baltrop’s Polaroid 450 and Ansco Panda Alvin Baltrop’s Twin-Lens Yashica-C camera Alvin Baltrop’s camera bag

58

59

BIOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Born 1948 in Bronx, New York

Selected Group Exhibitions

Died 2004 in New York

2012 Looking Back/The Sixth White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York

1973–75, School of Visual Arts, New York

Selected One-Person Exhibitions 2011 Alvin Baltrop: Photographs 1965–2003, Third Streaming, New York Alvin Baltrop: Selected Works, The Watermill Center, Water Mill, New York

2010 Alvin Baltrop: Color Photographs, 1971–1991, Famous Accountants, Brooklyn, New York

1992 Piers, The Bar, New York

1977 Alvin Baltrop, The Glines: A Gay Arts Center, New York

The Quality of Presence, Chelsea Hotel, New York

2010 Dead Flowers, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, and Participant Inc, New York Looking Back/The Fifth White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid YANS & RETO—Young and Not Stupid & Radical Even Though Old, Anthology Film Archives, New York

2009 Darkside II—Photographic Power and Violence, Disease and Death Photographed, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland Intersections: The Grand Concourse at 100, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York Peeps, The Amie and Tony James Gallery, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

60

Sexy and the City: New York Photographs, Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

2008 Artist as Publisher, The Center for Book Arts, New York Darkside I—Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland

2007 That 70s Show: New York City in the 1970s, powerHouse Arena, Brooklyn, New York

2005 Homomuseum: Heroes and Moments, Exit Art, New York

2003 Leisure, Aerolith, New York Overhead Underground: Reimagining the Faerie Landscape, Le Petit Versailles Garden, New York Postcards from the Edge, Galerie Lelong, New York West Side Sex Piers, Uzi N.Y. Gallery, New York

2002 Mess of Pottage, Gallery M, New York

Selected Publications and Reviews 2012 Wilcox, Randal. “The History That Alvin Baltrop Left Behind.”

Atlántica: Journal of Art and Thought, no. 52 (Spring/ Summer 2012): pp. 116–39.

2011 Cotter, Holland. “SoHo, Steadfast Bastion for Alternative Works.” New York Times, April 22, 2011.

Richard, Frances. “Alvin Baltrop, Third Streaming.”

Artforum (Summer 2011): p. 405.

2010 Crimp, Douglas. “Action Around the Edges.” In Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present, pp. 90–95, 115–116.

Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010.

Roysdon, Emily. West Street, photography by Alvin Baltrop.

New York: Printed Matter Inc., 2010.

Truax, Stephen. “Baltrop’s Sincerity: Love Shots of a Scarier NYC.” BushwickBK, October 13, 2010, http:// bushwickbk.com/2010/10/13/ baltrops-sincerity-love-shots-ofa-scarier-nyc/ (accessed June 19, 2012).

2009 Franzoni, Cristina. “Vision Germany—Al Baltrop: Pier Photographs 1975–1986.”

ZOOM Magazine (February 2009): p. 58.

Schoenberger, Thomas. “Im Nichts Muss Nichts Bewacht Werden: Alvin Baltrop.” Spex Magazine (January 2009): pp. 110–11.

Wilcox, Randal. “Pier Photographs.” Kaiserin Magazine: L’Outside, no. 5 (2009): pp. 46–51.

2008 Aldrich, Robert, et al. Gay Life and Culture: A World History, p. 335. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006.

Bannon, Anthony, and Douglas Crimp. “Musing on Transition.”

Image 46, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): pp. 4–8, 30.

Crimp, Douglas. “Alvin Baltrop: Pier Photographs 1975–1986.”

Artforum (February 2008): pp. 262–73.

Crimp, Douglas. “Diss-co (A Fragment).” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 50, no. 1 (Winter 2008): pp. 7–10.

Griffin, Tim. “Personal Histories.” Artforum (February 2008): p. 63.

Henriksen, Niels. “Postscript; Food, Sex and History – a letter from Douglas Crimp.” Karriere, no. 2 (Summer 2008): pp. 18–20, 22.

Huston, Johnny Ray. “A different light.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, June 25, 2008.

Stadel, Stefanie. “Welt am Sonntag: Kunstmarkt.”

Kunstmarkt, December 12, 2008, p. 90.

Stahel, Urs, et al. Darkside I: Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed, pp. 252–53. Exh. cat. Winterthur, Switzerland: Fotomuseum Winterthur; Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2008.

2004 Kinetz, Erica. “Neighborhood Report: West Side Piers; HonkyTonk Days.” New York Times, February 22, 2004.

“Out Front: People.” OUT Magazine, no. 133 (December 2004): p. 72.

2003 Roulette, Tod. “Artful Voyeurism.” Venus Magazine 9, no. 1 (January 2003): pp. 28, 31, 80.

1995 Peck, Dale. “Coming and Going Blues: for Gordon Armstrong and for Daniel George Marks, 1957–1988,” photography by Al Baltrop. LISP (Summer 1995): p. 26.

2007 That 70s Show: New York City in the 1970s, p. 85. Exh. cat. powerHouse Magazine series 2.

Brooklyn, N.Y.: powerhouse Books, 2007.

2006 “Positively Nasty.” LTTR, no. 5 (2006): pp. 3, 5.

2005 Cotter, Holland. “Art in Review: Homomuseum – Heroes and Monuments.” New York Times, June 24, 2005.

Hekma, Gert. “A Temporary Homomuseum in New York.”

Gay News, no. 168 (August 2005): pp. 54–57.

61

BIOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Born 1948 in Bronx, New York

Selected Group Exhibitions

Died 2004 in New York

2012 Looking Back/The Sixth White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York

1973–75, School of Visual Arts, New York

Selected One-Person Exhibitions 2011 Alvin Baltrop: Photographs 1965–2003, Third Streaming, New York Alvin Baltrop: Selected Works, The Watermill Center, Water Mill, New York

2010 Alvin Baltrop: Color Photographs, 1971–1991, Famous Accountants, Brooklyn, New York

1992 Piers, The Bar, New York

1977 Alvin Baltrop, The Glines: A Gay Arts Center, New York

The Quality of Presence, Chelsea Hotel, New York

2010 Dead Flowers, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, and Participant Inc, New York Looking Back/The Fifth White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid YANS & RETO—Young and Not Stupid & Radical Even Though Old, Anthology Film Archives, New York

2009 Darkside II—Photographic Power and Violence, Disease and Death Photographed, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland Intersections: The Grand Concourse at 100, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York Peeps, The Amie and Tony James Gallery, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

60

Sexy and the City: New York Photographs, Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

2008 Artist as Publisher, The Center for Book Arts, New York Darkside I—Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland

2007 That 70s Show: New York City in the 1970s, powerHouse Arena, Brooklyn, New York

2005 Homomuseum: Heroes and Moments, Exit Art, New York

2003 Leisure, Aerolith, New York Overhead Underground: Reimagining the Faerie Landscape, Le Petit Versailles Garden, New York Postcards from the Edge, Galerie Lelong, New York West Side Sex Piers, Uzi N.Y. Gallery, New York

2002 Mess of Pottage, Gallery M, New York

Selected Publications and Reviews 2012 Wilcox, Randal. “The History That Alvin Baltrop Left Behind.”

Atlántica: Journal of Art and Thought, no. 52 (Spring/ Summer 2012): pp. 116–39.

2011 Cotter, Holland. “SoHo, Steadfast Bastion for Alternative Works.” New York Times, April 22, 2011.

Richard, Frances. “Alvin Baltrop, Third Streaming.”

Artforum (Summer 2011): p. 405.

2010 Crimp, Douglas. “Action Around the Edges.” In Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present, pp. 90–95, 115–116.

Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010.

Roysdon, Emily. West Street, photography by Alvin Baltrop.

New York: Printed Matter Inc., 2010.

Truax, Stephen. “Baltrop’s Sincerity: Love Shots of a Scarier NYC.” BushwickBK, October 13, 2010, http:// bushwickbk.com/2010/10/13/ baltrops-sincerity-love-shots-ofa-scarier-nyc/ (accessed June 19, 2012).

2009 Franzoni, Cristina. “Vision Germany—Al Baltrop: Pier Photographs 1975–1986.”

ZOOM Magazine (February 2009): p. 58.

Schoenberger, Thomas. “Im Nichts Muss Nichts Bewacht Werden: Alvin Baltrop.” Spex Magazine (January 2009): pp. 110–11.

Wilcox, Randal. “Pier Photographs.” Kaiserin Magazine: L’Outside, no. 5 (2009): pp. 46–51.

2008 Aldrich, Robert, et al. Gay Life and Culture: A World History, p. 335. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006.

Bannon, Anthony, and Douglas Crimp. “Musing on Transition.”

Image 46, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): pp. 4–8, 30.

Crimp, Douglas. “Alvin Baltrop: Pier Photographs 1975–1986.”

Artforum (February 2008): pp. 262–73.

Crimp, Douglas. “Diss-co (A Fragment).” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 50, no. 1 (Winter 2008): pp. 7–10.

Griffin, Tim. “Personal Histories.” Artforum (February 2008): p. 63.

Henriksen, Niels. “Postscript; Food, Sex and History – a letter from Douglas Crimp.” Karriere, no. 2 (Summer 2008): pp. 18–20, 22.

Huston, Johnny Ray. “A different light.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, June 25, 2008.

Stadel, Stefanie. “Welt am Sonntag: Kunstmarkt.”

Kunstmarkt, December 12, 2008, p. 90.

Stahel, Urs, et al. Darkside I: Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed, pp. 252–53. Exh. cat. Winterthur, Switzerland: Fotomuseum Winterthur; Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2008.

2004 Kinetz, Erica. “Neighborhood Report: West Side Piers; HonkyTonk Days.” New York Times, February 22, 2004.

“Out Front: People.” OUT Magazine, no. 133 (December 2004): p. 72.

2003 Roulette, Tod. “Artful Voyeurism.” Venus Magazine 9, no. 1 (January 2003): pp. 28, 31, 80.

1995 Peck, Dale. “Coming and Going Blues: for Gordon Armstrong and for Daniel George Marks, 1957–1988,” photography by Al Baltrop. LISP (Summer 1995): p. 26.

2007 That 70s Show: New York City in the 1970s, p. 85. Exh. cat. powerHouse Magazine series 2.

Brooklyn, N.Y.: powerhouse Books, 2007.

2006 “Positively Nasty.” LTTR, no. 5 (2006): pp. 3, 5.

2005 Cotter, Holland. “Art in Review: Homomuseum – Heroes and Monuments.” New York Times, June 24, 2005.

Hekma, Gert. “A Temporary Homomuseum in New York.”

Gay News, no. 168 (August 2005): pp. 54–57.

61

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

All works courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming, New York, unless otherwise noted. Accession numbers (i.e., BAL00.000) are those assigned by The Alvin Baltrop Trust.

Height precedes width.

The Cloisters (Fort Tryon Park, NYC), 1965 Gelatin silver print 7 × 9½ inches BAL01.003 Navy (buttock and back), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print mounted on board 5¾ × 9½ inches BAL04.003 Navy (feet), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 5 × 7½ inches BAL02.005 Navy (genitals #1), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 5¾ × 9¾ inches BAL04.012 Navy (genitals #2), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¾ inches BAL04.014 Navy (naked man with legs open), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4 inches BAL04.016 Navy (portrait of a man), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches BAL02.014 Navy Sailor, 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4 × 6 inches BAL02.009 Navy Sailor (in his cabin), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 5 × 7 inches BAL02.008

62

Navy Sailor (leaning over deck’s rail), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 11 × 14 inches BAL02.010 Navy Sailor (with arm insignia), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print, unframed 8 × 10 inches BAL02.011 Navy Sailors, 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¾ inches BAL02.002 Navy (seated nude man), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¾ inches BAL04.015 Navy Ship, 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6½ inches BAL02.007 Ray (Navy), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 11 × 14 inches BAL25.008 Sunbathing on Navy Ship, 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¾ inches BAL02.006 Three Navy Sailors, 1969–72 Printed 2011, 2/15 Gelatin silver print 8½ × 12¾ inches BAL02.013 Collection Morteza Barharloo, Houston American Beauty (Navy), 1970 Printed 2011, 1/15 Gelatin silver print 8½ × 12¾ inches BAL02.012

Body, 1970–86 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches BAL04.007

Self-Portrait (with towel), 1972–80 Photo on Kodak paper 4½ × 3 inches BAL03.001

Buttocks, 1970–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6 5/8 inches BAL04.008

Woman Wearing Leather Jacket, 1972–80 Cibachrome photograph 4 × 6 inches BAL18.001

Woman Standing in Street, 1970–86 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches BAL19.003 Couple on a Bench, 1972–75 Gelatin silver print 4¼ × 9 inches BAL01.001 Missy (#1), 1972–75 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches BAL04.010 Missy (#2), 1972–75 3/8 Gelatin silver print 5½ × 8½ inches BAL19.006 Nude Woman with Jewelry, 1972–75 Printed 2011, 1/15 Digital C-print with colored ink 9¼ × 6¼ inches BAL16.003 Shower Faucets, 1972–75 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches BAL25.007

Construction Truck on the Street, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4½ inches BAL23.005 Elevated Train Platform at Night, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 8½ × 5¾ inches BAL23.006 Feet, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches BAL04.013 Mark, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 5 × 8 inches BAL06.022 Parked Car, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6 5/8 inches BAL23.002 Self-Portrait, 1972–86 Color processed photograph 5 × 7 inches BAL29.001

Alice, 1972–77 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches BAL19.007

The Piers (man looking in window), 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4½ inches BAL06.030

Self-Portrait (looking away), 1972–80 Photo on Kodak paper 3 × 5 inches BAL03.002

Two Men in Front of a Wire Gate, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6 5/8 inches BAL23.003

Street Scene (tossing basketball), 1974 Printed 2011, 1/15 Digital C-print 8½ × 12¾ inches BAL24.001 Private collection, Houston Female Prostitute (Bronx, NY), 1974–75 Gelatin silver print 4 × 6¼ inches BAL04.017 Female nude, 1974-80 1/15 Digital C-print 6 × 9¼ inches BAL16.002 Person Lying on the Grass, 1974–80 1/15 Pigment print 6 × 9½ inches BAL18.003 Don’t let them see you (The Piers), 1975–78 Gelatin silver print 8¼ × 12¼ inches BAL09.026 In the family (The Piers), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4 inches BAL14.006 Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with man in sunlight), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 5¼ × 8 inches BAL12.021 Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with nude man), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4 × 6¼ inches BAL11.005 Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with two men), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 9¼ inches BAL12.020 Water Mill Center Collection, New York

The Piers (arsonist climbing down fire escape ladder), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4½ inches BAL14.005

The Piers (interior with two doorways), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 11 × 14 inches BAL10.011

The Piers (man wearing jock strap), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4¼ inches BAL06.021

The Piers (collapsed warehouse), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 8 × 6 inches BAL11.003

The Piers (male portrait), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 4 inches BAL06.028 Collection Dr. David Colbert, New York

The Piers (open door), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6½ inches BAL10.005

The Piers (couple on blanket), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 5¾ × 3¾ inches BAL09.029 The Piers (exterior façade and dock), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 65/8 inches BAL11.002 The Piers (exterior of warehouse on fire), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 9½ × 7½ inches BAL14.007 The Piers (exterior with awnings), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 7 inches BAL13.026 The Piers (firemen), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6½ inches BAL14.001 The Piers (interior doorway), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 9¾ × 6½ inches BAL10.004 The Piers (interior of collapsing warehouse), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 5¾ × 9¾ inches BAL12.017 The Piers (interior with man in sunlit doorway), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¼ inches BAL12.024

The Piers (male portrait in sunlight), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 12½ × 7¾ inches BAL06.026 The Piers (man from below), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4 inches BAL06.029 The Piers (man giving a blow job), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 5 × 8½ inches BAL11.004 Water Mill Center Collection, New York The Piers (man lying on sheet), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 13 × 8½ inches BAL09.027

The Piers (open window), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 7¼ × 5 inches BAL10.009 The Piers (person lying under sheet), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 7½ × 9½ inches BAL12.023 The Piers (person standing alone in West Street parking lot), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4½ inches BAL23.007 The Piers (portrait of transsexual in front of motorcycle), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 4 inches BAL19.005 The Piers (Scumbag), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 14 × 11 inches BAL06.024

The Piers (man lying under sheet), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 7 inches BAL12.019

The Piers (stationary room), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6½ inches BAL10.010

The Piers (man masturbating), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 13 × 8½ inches BAL09.025

The Piers (sunbathing platform with Tava mural), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4 × 6¼ inches BAL13.025

The Piers (man standing on the dock), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 14 × 11 inches BAL06.025

The Piers (three men on dock), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 8 × 12½ inches BAL21.001

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WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

All works courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming, New York, unless otherwise noted. Accession numbers (i.e., BAL00.000) are those assigned by The Alvin Baltrop Trust.

Height precedes width.

The Cloisters (Fort Tryon Park, NYC), 1965 Gelatin silver print 7 × 9½ inches BAL01.003 Navy (buttock and back), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print mounted on board 5¾ × 9½ inches BAL04.003 Navy (feet), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 5 × 7½ inches BAL02.005 Navy (genitals #1), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 5¾ × 9¾ inches BAL04.012 Navy (genitals #2), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¾ inches BAL04.014 Navy (naked man with legs open), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4 inches BAL04.016 Navy (portrait of a man), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches BAL02.014 Navy Sailor, 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4 × 6 inches BAL02.009 Navy Sailor (in his cabin), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 5 × 7 inches BAL02.008

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Navy Sailor (leaning over deck’s rail), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 11 × 14 inches BAL02.010 Navy Sailor (with arm insignia), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print, unframed 8 × 10 inches BAL02.011 Navy Sailors, 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¾ inches BAL02.002 Navy (seated nude man), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¾ inches BAL04.015 Navy Ship, 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6½ inches BAL02.007 Ray (Navy), 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 11 × 14 inches BAL25.008 Sunbathing on Navy Ship, 1969–72 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¾ inches BAL02.006 Three Navy Sailors, 1969–72 Printed 2011, 2/15 Gelatin silver print 8½ × 12¾ inches BAL02.013 Collection Morteza Barharloo, Houston American Beauty (Navy), 1970 Printed 2011, 1/15 Gelatin silver print 8½ × 12¾ inches BAL02.012

Body, 1970–86 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches BAL04.007

Self-Portrait (with towel), 1972–80 Photo on Kodak paper 4½ × 3 inches BAL03.001

Buttocks, 1970–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6 5/8 inches BAL04.008

Woman Wearing Leather Jacket, 1972–80 Cibachrome photograph 4 × 6 inches BAL18.001

Woman Standing in Street, 1970–86 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches BAL19.003 Couple on a Bench, 1972–75 Gelatin silver print 4¼ × 9 inches BAL01.001 Missy (#1), 1972–75 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches BAL04.010 Missy (#2), 1972–75 3/8 Gelatin silver print 5½ × 8½ inches BAL19.006 Nude Woman with Jewelry, 1972–75 Printed 2011, 1/15 Digital C-print with colored ink 9¼ × 6¼ inches BAL16.003 Shower Faucets, 1972–75 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches BAL25.007

Construction Truck on the Street, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4½ inches BAL23.005 Elevated Train Platform at Night, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 8½ × 5¾ inches BAL23.006 Feet, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches BAL04.013 Mark, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 5 × 8 inches BAL06.022 Parked Car, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6 5/8 inches BAL23.002 Self-Portrait, 1972–86 Color processed photograph 5 × 7 inches BAL29.001

Alice, 1972–77 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches BAL19.007

The Piers (man looking in window), 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4½ inches BAL06.030

Self-Portrait (looking away), 1972–80 Photo on Kodak paper 3 × 5 inches BAL03.002

Two Men in Front of a Wire Gate, 1972–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6 5/8 inches BAL23.003

Street Scene (tossing basketball), 1974 Printed 2011, 1/15 Digital C-print 8½ × 12¾ inches BAL24.001 Private collection, Houston Female Prostitute (Bronx, NY), 1974–75 Gelatin silver print 4 × 6¼ inches BAL04.017 Female nude, 1974-80 1/15 Digital C-print 6 × 9¼ inches BAL16.002 Person Lying on the Grass, 1974–80 1/15 Pigment print 6 × 9½ inches BAL18.003 Don’t let them see you (The Piers), 1975–78 Gelatin silver print 8¼ × 12¼ inches BAL09.026 In the family (The Piers), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4 inches BAL14.006 Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with man in sunlight), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 5¼ × 8 inches BAL12.021 Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with nude man), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4 × 6¼ inches BAL11.005 Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with two men), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 9¼ inches BAL12.020 Water Mill Center Collection, New York

The Piers (arsonist climbing down fire escape ladder), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4½ inches BAL14.005

The Piers (interior with two doorways), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 11 × 14 inches BAL10.011

The Piers (man wearing jock strap), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4¼ inches BAL06.021

The Piers (collapsed warehouse), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 8 × 6 inches BAL11.003

The Piers (male portrait), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 4 inches BAL06.028 Collection Dr. David Colbert, New York

The Piers (open door), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6½ inches BAL10.005

The Piers (couple on blanket), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 5¾ × 3¾ inches BAL09.029 The Piers (exterior façade and dock), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 65/8 inches BAL11.002 The Piers (exterior of warehouse on fire), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 9½ × 7½ inches BAL14.007 The Piers (exterior with awnings), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 7 inches BAL13.026 The Piers (firemen), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6½ inches BAL14.001 The Piers (interior doorway), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 9¾ × 6½ inches BAL10.004 The Piers (interior of collapsing warehouse), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 5¾ × 9¾ inches BAL12.017 The Piers (interior with man in sunlit doorway), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6¼ inches BAL12.024

The Piers (male portrait in sunlight), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 12½ × 7¾ inches BAL06.026 The Piers (man from below), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4 inches BAL06.029 The Piers (man giving a blow job), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 5 × 8½ inches BAL11.004 Water Mill Center Collection, New York The Piers (man lying on sheet), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 13 × 8½ inches BAL09.027

The Piers (open window), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 7¼ × 5 inches BAL10.009 The Piers (person lying under sheet), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 7½ × 9½ inches BAL12.023 The Piers (person standing alone in West Street parking lot), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6½ × 4½ inches BAL23.007 The Piers (portrait of transsexual in front of motorcycle), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 4 inches BAL19.005 The Piers (Scumbag), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 14 × 11 inches BAL06.024

The Piers (man lying under sheet), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 7 inches BAL12.019

The Piers (stationary room), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 6½ inches BAL10.010

The Piers (man masturbating), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 13 × 8½ inches BAL09.025

The Piers (sunbathing platform with Tava mural), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4 × 6¼ inches BAL13.025

The Piers (man standing on the dock), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 14 × 11 inches BAL06.025

The Piers (three men on dock), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 8 × 12½ inches BAL21.001

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The Piers (two containers on the dock), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4½ × 65/8 inches BAL13.016

The Piers (man in front of window), 1977 Gelatin silver print 12½ × 7¾ inches BAL06.027

The Piers (two men looking outside), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print mounted on board 4¼ × 6¾ inches BAL12.014

Super Cream, 1980 Printed 2011, 1/15 Digital C-print 9¼ × 6¼ inches BAL18.002

The Piers (two men sitting in window, graffiti on wall “Free Pier Warehouse Newsletter, take a copy, tell your friends the truth about the piers”), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 7½ × 9¾ inches BAL12.025 The Piers (two people lying by the water), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches BAL13.020 The Piers (two people sunbathing), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 9½ × 6¼ inches BAL13.015 The Piers (warehouse on fire with firemen), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 4¼ × 7¾ inches BAL14.004 The Piers (with person lying on floor next to a large hole), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 9½ inches BAL12.022 Untitled (Scumbag and anonymous woman having sex), 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 4 inches BAL09.028 Woman Crossing Street, 1975–86 Gelatin silver print 5¾ × 4 inches BAL23.008 Friend (The Piers), 1977 Gelatin silver print 5 × 4¼ inches BAL21.002

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The Piers (exterior with person sunbathing), 1980 Printed 2011, 1/15 Digital C-print 6¼ × 9¼ inches BAL15.003 Portrait of Mark at the Piers, 1980–86 Gelatin silver print 5 × 8 inches BAL20.002 Dune at World Financial Center (New York City), 1985–88 Gelatin silver print 2½ × 2½ inches BAL25.006 Man in Turquoise Coat, 1990 Printed 2011, 1/15 Digital C-print 12¾ × 8½ inches BAL18.004 From My Roof Top (World Trade Center twin towers in flames), 2001 Black and white print 6 × 4 inches BAL25.005 Bingo, 2003 Printed 2011, 1/15 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 9¼ inches BAL25.010 Self-Portrait, October 2003, 2003 Printed 2011, 1/15 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 9¼ inches BAL03.003 Three Chairs, 2003 Printed 2011, 1/15 Gelatin silver print 6¼ × 9¼ inches BAL25.009

March to the Piers, 1995 Poster: Photographic Exhibition

by Alvin Baltrop, The Glines: A Gay Arts Center, 1977 Correspondence and Ephemera 18 Points document, n.d.

Camera bag and cameras (Polaroid 450, Minolta EX-7, Weston WX-7, Minolta SRT100, Compure-Rapid, Twin-Lens Yashica-C, and Ansco Panda) Card: Safe Sex Party “One Free Nite Stamped on Back,” n.d.

Letter to James (brother), n.d.

Photo of Baltrop, n.d.

Press release from The Glines, designed by James Baltrop, n.d.

Letter/Envelope to Mrs. Dorothy Baltrop (mother), 1969 Invoice: Van, 1974 Poster: Photographic Exhibition by Alvin Baltrop, The Glines: A Gay Arts Center, 1977 Copyright agreement, 1991 Various buttons, circa 1992 Letter to Glen (friend), September 29, 1994 Flyer/Announcement: LISP magazine, 1995 Flyer: March to the Piers, 1995 LISP magazine, summer edition with Navy photo interior, 1995 Announcement: Leisure exhibition, 2003 Letter/Envelope from Angela Westwater at The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, May 28, 2003 Postcard from Jennifer Chapek at The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, September 06, 2003

opposite: Dune at World Financial Center (New York City), 1985–88

Perspectives 179: Alvin Baltrop Dreams Into Glass

CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON

CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON

Alvin Baltrop Dreams Into Glass

Alvin Baltrop Dreams Into Glass

US $14.95