Untitled

Alvin Baltrop, 1975-86

Alright, start with the blanket. Plaid. Spread out on the wood. Two naked guys on it. Having sex. One’s standing, looking down at the other, who’s stretched out on his back. Behind them, rusted metal. Broken planks. Then the Hudson. Nice that somebody thought to bring a blanket. This is Manhattan’s West Side. Seventies into the eighties. The old abandoned shipping piers. Ya know… people find uses for them. Gay men come to cruise. People lie in the sun. People with nowhere to live find a corner. Some are just kids. The guy with the camera is Alvin Baltrop. From the Bronx. Black. Gay. In ’69, he’s in the Navy, working as a medic. Photographs his shipmates. Sets up a darkroom in the sick bay, using medical trays to develop the pictures. Back in New York, he drives a cab. Finds the piers. Then he gives up the cab, gets a van, takes moving jobs. Work that leaves time for making the pictures. He parks by the river and just stays for days. “To get certain shots,” he said, “I hung from the ceilings of several warehouses utilizing a makeshift harness.” So picture him up there. Just waiting and watching. More than ten years of going back. Thousands of pictures. He makes his own prints. They’re small. And he tries to get them shown. Somebody looks through his portfolio and calls him “a real sewer rat type of person.” Another accuses him of stealing a white photographer’s portfolio. Only two shows in his lifetime. One’s at a gay bar where he works the door. He’s diagnosed with cancer in the late nineties. Dies in 2004 at fifty-five. He leaves thousands of negatives. Mostly pictures he never had the money to print. Four years later, a critic writes about him in Artforum. Then come the exhibitions. The museum collections. In 2019, a retrospective at the Bronx Museum. And here’s a good detail. The fund that pays for this one was started with money from sales of The Family of Man. A photography book from 1955. Babies. Lovers. Old people. Lives from all over the world. The idea is that we all belong to one human family. It sells millions. That money buys MoMA photographs for years. Including this one. Okay, look past them at the river. Baltrop photographed bodies pulled out of that water, too. Cops standing around them. He said he wanted to save “the frightening, mad, unbelievable, violent, and beautiful things” going on out there.

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