Baltimore Portraits

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 adicts, drag queens and hustlers - spans a 20-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 and familial neglect. 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 Badertscher’s art in relation to gay and lesbian cultural politics.