UNTITLED
ALVIN BALTROP, 1975-86
Two men on a blanket. Sun. The Hudson behind them, and a piece of rusted pier infrastructure half-collapsed at the edge of the frame. This is the West Side of Manhattan, sometime between 1975 and 1986. The piers were abandoned shipping infrastructure along the river, vacated by industry and taken over by gay men, runaways, sunbathers, artists, and people with nowhere else to go. The photographer is Alvin Baltrop. Black, gay, a Vietnam veteran who served as a Navy corpsman and started photographing in the service. He came home to New York and worked a string of jobs. Cab driver. Mover. Then he started spending all his time at the piers. He quit the cab, parked his van there, and lived out of it for days at a time so he could keep shooting. This is what he was shooting. Two men on a blanket, fully committed to the moment, the river right there, the wreckage right there. He didn't pretty it up. He didn't dramatize it. He gave you desire with nowhere soft to land. Here's the part that changes the picture. Baltrop didn't only photograph intimacy at the piers. He also photographed bodies pulled from the Hudson. The piers were where bodies got dumped. Same water. Same wood. He documented sex and death in the same square footage, with the same camera, sometimes the same week. So when this picture holds tenderness and risk at once, it isn't atmospheric. It's specific. The river behind them in this image is the same river he photographed bodies floating in. He died of cancer in 2004, broke. Almost no one knew his work. Recognition came later, after he was gone. Refuge built out of wreckage. Intimacy in the margins. The margins were real places.