Baltimore Portraits

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Photography Queer Theory/Lesbian & Gay studies

by Amos Badertscher,

Introduction by Tyler Curtain

Duke University Press

Due/Published June 1999, 112 pages, paper

ISBN 0822323680

This is a book of photographs by Amos Badertscher--often accompanied by revealing, hand-written narratives about their subjects--that 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 autobiographical--nature of his portraits. Their simplicity along with the text's intimacy are exptrmely powerful. 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. You may not have heard of Badertscher, but once you see the photographs, you won't forget them. 80 b&w photographs