Description
Book SynopsisDocuments a sector of Baltimore that has virtually disappeared due to substance abuse, AIDS, and, societal or familial neglect. This volume contains images of bar and street people - transvestites, strippers, drug addicts, drag queens, and hustlers - spanning a twenty-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.
Trade Review“
Baltimore Portraits is a rich and stark picture of community: as beautiful as it is ugly, as depressing as it is joyful, as lean as it is full. Badertscher’s photographs and their scrawling inscriptions are telling stories that we long to hear (or not hear) but rarely get. By picturing the unpictured, by writing the unsaid, our expectations are meaningfully betrayed.”—Carol Mavor, author of
Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs“These images of many of the denizens of Baltimore’s gay ‘underground’ in the 1970s are often deeply disturbing. The literal nakedness of many of the subjects provides only a minimal index of how painfully exposed and vulnerable some of them are. I feel grateful to Amos Badertscher for having produced and preserved these images, and to Tyler Curtain for the responsive generosity of his vision of them.”—Michael Moon, author of
A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol“A brilliantly disturbing collection of photographs. . . . It is a hard, frequently painful experience to tour Badertscher’s Baltimore; this is not your mother’s
Best of Life Magazine. There is very little triumph here, and a great deal of human tragedy, at least to anyone living a comfortable middle-class existence. However, it is a very important tour to take. No one, after looking at these photographs, will feel quite the same about his or her ‘privileged’ world again.” * A&U Magazine *
“[A] fascinating pictorial account of some of Badertscher’s Baltimore subjects. . . . A very powerful snapshot of what was, is now, and always will be as long as mankind lives on this earth. This is true documentary photography. . . .” * AIDS Book Review Journal *
“In
Baltimore Portraits, photographer and Baltimore native Amos Badertscher gives us a view of ‘Charm City’ through a lens that crosses Diane Arbus with Robert Mapplethorpe. . . . The beautifully composed and printed black and white portraits contrast the grim lives of people on the margins—young street hustlers, prostitutes, and drug users—with a few local underground celebrities, drag queens, and self-portraits thrown in to soften the blow. . . . The images in
Baltimore Portraits appear to be reality in its purest form.” * Washington Blade *
Table of ContentsForeward / Michael P. Mezzatesta x
Preface / Amos Badertscher xii
A Baltimore Essay: Photograpahy, Sexuality, Community / Tyler Curtain 1
Baltimore Portraits / Amos Badertscher 13
