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Alvin Baltrop

The Photography of Alvin Baltrop

Born in Bronx borough of New York in December of 1948, Alvin Baltrop was a working-class American photographer who extensively documented the dilapidated Hudson River piers and New York City’s clandestine gay culture during the 1970s and 1980s. 

Alvin Baltrop was the younger son of Dorothy Mae Baltrop who had moved from Virginia to the Bronx with her eldest son James. He discovered photography while attending junior high school and began photographing with a twin-lens Yashica camera. Baltrop studied under the older photographers in his neighborhood and taught himself the techniques of film development. During the Vietnam War, he enlisted in 1969 as a medic in the U.S. Navy and photographed his fellow crew members. After his military service ended in 1972 with an honorable discharge, Baltrop returned to New York City where he worked in a variety of odd jobs, including as a street vendor and cab driver.

In December of 1973, a truck laden with asphalt crashed through Manhattan’s elevated West Side Highway between West Twelfth and Gansevoort Streets and forever closed that section of highway to the south. The abandoned and dilapidated Hudson River piers to the west of the closed highway presented opportunities both as art platforms and meeting places. Fifteen years elapsed before the elevated structure was fully dismantled; the location served during this time as a major New York experimental art and social venue.  

In 1973, Alvin Baltrop enrolled in the School of Visual Arts where he studied photography until 1975. Interested in photographing the Hudson River piers, he became a self-employed mover of household furniture and belongings, work that allowed him to spend more time with his photography. Although initially terrified of the area, Baltrop constantly photographed the West Side piers from 1975 to 1986, particularly those piers that bordered Greenwich Village starting at the meatpacking district and extending south to Christopher Street. 

Baltrop often shot images at the piers for several days and lived inside his moving van parked nearby. Capturing both the personalities and the structure of the piers, he became a well-known member of its artistic and gay community and remembered every person he photographed. Baltrop eventually became established as both friend and confidant to many of those who frequented the pier areas. 

Although his work had both documentary and aesthetic value, Baltrop had great difficulty in finding a gallery to sponsor an exhibition of his work during his lifetime. In 1977, he had a small solo show at the Glines, a non-profit gay art organization best known for producing Harvey Fierstein’s 1982 “Torch Song Trilogy”. Baltrop also had an exhibition of his “Pier” series at an East Village gay bar where he occasionally was employed as a bouncer. However, the established photography galleries, even those that presented explicit homoerotic work, were unreceptive to Baltrop’s work.

As a result, Alvin Baltrop never gained the finances necessary to print the vast majority of his thousands of negatives or to properly care for those he managed to print. The majority of his printed photographs are small, approximately 13 x 18 centimeters (5 x 7 inches), however, he did print a few larger images. His photographs of the Hudson River pier area  constitute a significant record of a lost era of New York City’s industrial landscape and the gay culture’s pre-AIDS history. While his photography was documentary in nature, its studied compositions, intimacy, and the attention to both light and shadow attest to an artistic ambition.

Baltrop was befriended by the New York City glass artist and writer John Drury in the late 1990s. Drury, who recognized Baltrop’s  photographic abilities, nominated him for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award for the Arts. Baltrop received a diagnosis of cancer in the 1990s, a time when he was impoverished and without insurance for care. After only a few exhibitions during decades of photographic work, Alvin Baltrop passed away due to complications from cancer and diabetes at the age of fifty-five in New York City on the first day of February in 2004. 

In 2012, a retrospective solo exhibition entitled “Perspectives 179-Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass”, which included almost one hundred gelatin silver prints, was held at Houston’s  Contemporary Art Museum. New York’s Bronx Museum of Art, custodian of many Baltrop photographs and negatives, held a 2019 retrospective of his work, entitled “The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop”, that included works from Baltrop’s private archive never before viewed by the public. 

Alvin Baltrop’s work has also been included in several exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art including its 2015 “America is Hard to See”, 2016-2017 “Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection”, 2020 “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970-1986” and the 2024 “Trust Me”, an exhibition of intergenerational artists.

Unless noted otherwise, all photographs in this article are used courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust, @ 2010, The Alvin Baltrop Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS) and Galerie Bucholz, New York. All rights reserved. 

Notes: New York’s Museum of Modern Art has an article on Alvin Baltrop, along with several images from its collection, on its website at: https://www.moma.org/artists/48461-alvin-baltrop

An extensive biography of Alvin Baltrop, composed by the Alvin Baltrop Trust and drawn from audio recordings and interviews, can be found at the global strategic-consultancy Third Streaming site located at: http://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-biography

Issue 4 of GAYLETTER Magazine has a short biography on the life of Alvin Baltrop written by Chris Stewart entitled “Alvin Baltrop’s Days on the Piers” located at: https://gayletter.com/alvin-baltrops-days-on-the-piers/

PIN-UP magazine has an article by Alejandro Carrion entitled “Masculinity Under Construction” that discusses, among other artists, the Hudson River pier area and Alvin Baltrop’s photography at: https://www.pinupmagazine.org/articles/sexy-construction-workers-urban-homoeroticism

Top Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “Self Portrait with Alice”, 1975, Ektachrome Slide, The Alvin Baltrop Trust

Second Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers ( Sunbathing Platform with Tava Mural)”, 1976-1985, Gelatin Silver Print, The Alvin Baltrop Trust 

Third Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers (Two Men)”, 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Three Sunbathers), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 35  cm, Printed 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Male Portrait), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, and The Alvin Baltrop Trust 

Andreas Fux

Photography by Andreas Fux

Born in East Berlin of the German Democratic Republic in 1964, Andreas Fux is a photographer whose body of work focuses on how the human individual evolves into his own artistic creation. He belongs to the Prenzlauerberg photo artist scene, which documented the last decade of the German Democratic Republic. 

Andreas Fux initially trained from 1980 to 1982 as an electrician. In 1983, he began his own sstudy of  the process and techniques of photographic work. During the years between 1983 and 1988, Fux exhibited his photographs in private gallery spaces. His first published works appeared in a 1988 issue of Das Magazin, a monthly East Berlin magazine that focused on culture and lifestyle. Working as a freelancer, Fux provided the publication with black and white photographs covering Berlin’s punk and youth culture.

 In 1989, Fux worked on photo productions for Deutsche Film-Aldiengesellschaff, the state-owned film studio of East Germany. Since 1990, he has been working as a freelance photographer for various newspapers and magazines, as well as executing his own photographic projects. In 1992, Fux’s first solo photographic book was published entitled “The Russians”; it was a supplement to his solo exhibition, of the same name, at the Janssen Gallery in Berlin, a show which later traveled to Hamburg and Munich. 

Andreas Fux gained a wider audience for his work with the 2005 series “The Sweet Skin”, which covered a decade of works between 1995 and 2005. For this series of portraits which focused on tattoos and skin scarification; he followed the lives of his models, with daily documentation and night shoots in his studio. Against a mostly white background and in the silence of the photo studio, nude photographs of his models were taken, in which the contrast between intimacy of the body and clinical sterility of the room was exaggerated. In another series entitled “At the End of the Night”, whose topic was body culture, the nude, and sexuality, Fux posed his subjects against a black background with a selective light source that modeled and fragmented the models sculpturally. 

Fux’s 2001 series “The Horizonte” is reminiscent in its formality of the 1980s “Seascapes” series done by Japanese photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto, in which Sugimoto bifurcated the landscape images exactly in half by the horizon line. At the beginning of September 2001, Fux travelled across the North Sea on board a Ukrainian training sailboat. For this series, he celebrated the beauty of the horizon as an interaction between sea, clouds and light. The images of “The Horizonte” series were seen by the critics as an expression of calm and innocence. For his 2010 series “Kerberos and Chimaira”, Fux staged his motifs in a wind tunnel at Berlin-Adlershot. Using the strict compositions of expressionism and the aesthetic codes of the latex and fetish scene, his series examined  a dangerous and often not considered proximity between the erotic picture codes of fetishism and the aesthetics of National Socialism.

For his 2016 exhibition “Shame and Beauty”,  Andreas Fux opposed new portraits with a selection of older works, a combination which showed the development of his oeuvre over the years. His new work preserved the almost tender and respectful handling of his subjects found in his early works. The photographic sessions in which he bathed his models in soft light took an entire night, were meticulously planned, and took place in a highly sensitized atmosphere. This Berlin show contextualized the discussion on governmental and social repression and persecution; the works in this show had previously been exhibited by Fux in Moscow in September of 2015 under rather adverse conditions.

Andreas Fux has had solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including the Widmer and Theodoris Gallery in Zurich, the Photo Festival in New York, the Esther Woerdehoff Gallery in Paris and the Pasinger Fabrik Gallery in Munich.

A collection of Fux’s photo work from Berlin can be found at: https://andreas-fux.berlin

Henry-Robert Brésil

Paintings by Henry-Robert Brésil

Born in September of 1952 in Gonaīves, Haiti, Henry-Robert Brésil began to paint in his childhood, fascinated by the landscape of Haiti and its wildlife. At twenty-one years of age, he moved to Port au Prince in 1973, where his luminous jungle landscapes, instantly recognizable for his repetitive use of jungle vegetation, often populated with pink flamingos, received much attention. Although the majority of his oil on canvas work is of medium size, Brésil has also painted canvases of monumental size, with skyless scenes filling the surface.

Brésil won the ISPAN-UNESCO Prize in 1981 from its Institute for the Safeguarding of the National Patrimony. After the award, he began exhibiting in all the major galleries of Haiti. Recognized in major art books on Haitian art, Brésil’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including in the United States, Italy, France, Switzerland, Japan, Puerto Rico, and his native country of Haiti. 

A meticulous artist who became quite eccentric in his later years, Henry-Robert Brésil was tragically killed, at the age of forty-seven, in 1999 during a violent altercation that took place at a local market restaurant. 

Kamrooz Aram

Kamrooz Aram, “Arabesco”, 2019, Oil, Oil Crayon, Wax Pencil, and Pencil on LInen, 157 x 137 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1978 in Shiraz, Iran, Kamrooz Aram received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2003. His work is rooted in the practice and history of painting; in addition, he also works in the fields of photography, collage, sculpture, and exhibition design. Aram’s work is a blend of Modernism with ornamental, often non-Western, art.

Aram’s recent exhibitions often function as full installations, combining painting, sculpture, collage, and exhibition design to create an overall experience. His solo exhibitions have included  the 2019 “Arabesque” at the Green Art Gallery in Dubai; “An Object, A Gesture” at New York’s FLAG Foundation in 2018; “FOCUS: Kamrooz Aram” at Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum in 2018; and “Ornament for Indifferent Architecture” at Belgium’s Museum Dhondt-Dhaenena in 2017.

Bonifacio Lázaro

Bonifacio Lázaro. “Nazaré Triptych (People of the Sea)”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, Triptych, 200 x 242 cm,  Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid, Spain

Born on February 15, 1906, in Nazare, Portugal, Bonifácio Lázaro studied at the School of Arts and Crafts of Setúbal and later in Lisbon at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes. Born to parents linked to the fishing industry of Portugal, the expressionist painter dedicated a large part of his work to the people of his homeland, who lived their lives in a constant struggle with the sea. in 1927, Lázaro won the Annunciation Award, an annual award given to students from the Academy of Fine Arts for distinguished work in the genre of animalistic works.

In 1942, Bonifacio Lázaro won the Rocha Cabral Prize from the Lisbon National Academy of Fine Arts for the Nazaré Triptych “People of the Sea”and; in 1943, he obtained the Silver Medal at the National Fine Arts Exhibition for another triptych “Fishermen of Nazaré”,  related to the previous one. Both works, having important dimensions of 2 x 2.4 meters, are conceived as ethnographic altarpieces with an atmosphere of mysticism.

Recognized by many awards and medals, Lázaro’s works can publicly be seen at the José Malhoa Museum in Caldas da Rainha, the Museu da Nazaré, the Museu do Chiado in Lisbon, and the Columbus Museum in Georgia, USA. There are also several works at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom and the Provincial Museum in Badajoz, Spain. Lázaro’s works are also included in many private collections. 

Pripyat, Ukraine

Infra-Red Photography of Pripyat, Ukraine

Vladimir took thise photographs of Pripyat, a ghost city in the Ukraine. UNESCO included it in its list as a world heritage cities. The city was founded in February of 1970 and grew to a population fo 49,360 by the time of its evacuation on the afternoon of April 27, 1986, the day after the Chernobyl Disaster. It is considered relatively safe to visit, and several companies offer guided tours around the area.

Markus Ecke Wie Kante

Markus Ecke Wie Kante, Urbex Places in Germany

Fantastic shots of urbex places around Germany by Markus Ecke Wie Kante, talented self-taught photographer, adventurer and urban explorer based in Berlin, Germany. Markus focuses on abandoned photography. He travels all over Europe to capture impressive urbex places.

Images reblogged with thanks to https://photogrist.com

Sven Fennema

Sven Fennema, “Corridorio di Tristezza”, from his “Rise and Fall” Series

Sven Fennema was born in 1981 in Xanten, Germany. He currently lives and works ooutside of Dusseldorf. He started his journey into photography in 2007 and started his own company, Living Pictures, in 2009. The focus of his photography is “Lost Places” – deserted places and buildings, stripped of their functions. Whether if it’s a hidden fairytale castle, rust-eaten industrial sites or former mental hospitals. Fennema tells their stories, good as well as bad ones. He captures the ailing motifs in a touching world, somewhere in between the past and today in vibrant and living pictures.

His company site is https://www.sven-fennema.de.  His photographs and books are available from this site.

Kilian Schönberger

Kilian Schönberger, (The Abandoned Mill), Bavarian Forest, Germany

Kilian Schönberger’s work boasts captivating clarity and depth, serving to distinguish it from the masses of landscape photography. The range of color and tone found in his images is made all the more impressive by the fact that Schönberger is colorblind. Focusing on texture and pattern instead of color, Schönberger creates brightly contrasted, beautiful images.

“I recognized that I could turn this so-called disadvantage into a strength…while getting a picture of a chaotic forest scene, I can’t clearly distinguish the different green and brown tones. Brushing aside this ‘handicap’ I don’t care about those tones and just concentrate on the patterns of wood to achieve an impressive image structure.”               – Kilian Schönberger

An Era Gone By

Photographer Unknown, (An Era Gone By: Jones Sewing Machine)

The Jones Sewing Machine Company was a British manufacturer of sweing machines founded in 1860 by William Jones and Thomas Chadwick under the name ‘Chadwick and Jones’ that later become known as the Jones Sewing Machine Company. The Jones patent for his popular Serpent Neck model appeared in 1879. These were manufactured until 1909. The machine pictured employ a transverse boat shuttle mechanism forming a lock stitch. Many of the Jones machines displayed very ornamental decoration ensuring that they were kept in good condition as decorative items in the household.