Baltimore Portraits

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Baltimore Portraits is a unique presentation of photographs by Amos Badertscher. These portraits-many accompanied by poignantly revealing, hand-written narratives about their subjects-represent a sector of Baltimore that has gone largely unnoticed and rarely has been documented. In this volume, the assemblage of images of bar and street people-transvestites, strippers, drug addicts, drag queens, and hustlers-spans a twenty-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Badertscher's arresting and melancholy photographs document a culture that has virtually disappeared due to substance abuse, AIDS, and, often, societal or family neglect.

The photographer's focus on content rather than on elaborate technique reveals the intensely personal-and, indeed, autobiographical-nature of his portraits. Their simplicity along with the text's intimacy affects the viewer in ways not easily forgotten. An introduction by Tyler Curtain contextualizes the photographs both within the history of Baltimore and its queer subculture and in relationship to contemporaneous work by photographers Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Duane Michaels, and others. Curtain also positions the underlying concerns of Bardertscher's art in relation to gay and lesbian cultural politics.

This striking collection of portraits, along with the photographer's moving text, will impact not only a general audience of photographers and enthusiasts of the art but also those engaged with gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and cultural studies in general. It is published in association with the Duke University Museum of Art.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Independent

Badertscher is clearly performing the necessary task of chronicling a constantly threatened American subculture. This chronicle often takes the form of a narrative and visual tribute to people who are proudly and flamboyantly off-center. The photographs imply a collaborative quest between artist and subject for the pose and gesture that will most symbolically reveal a personality-or more specifically, reveal the anger, humor, morbidity, despair, lostness, shyness, hunger, creepiness, fearfulness, confusion, and elegance of that personality. . . . Integral to the conceptual life of the photographs are the text inscriptions that underlie and sometimes surround them. . . . [T]hey complicate and humanize the photographer, who, by providing the details of lives . . . as well as brief psychological evaluations, exclamatory tributes, and poetic epitaphs, serves the role of a village historian whose act of remembering tenders the gift of recognition to those who have been denied any significant portion of the public space. . . . Before our eyes, before Badertscher's eyes, appreciation has turned into memorial. This is indeed a complicated work."-The Independent

Baltimore Gay Paper