GALLERY
Queer Lenses Snare A Queer Village
Two photographers, both men of color, off er diff erent takes
Alvin Baltrop’s close-up of Marsha P. Johnson.
BY NICHOLAS BOSTON
This month brings to a close a year of
almost compulsory self-refl ection for
the LGBTQ community as a whole.
The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall
riots spurred discussions and displays far and
wide striving to link the past to the present.
Two important exhibitions of photography
mounted in New York in the last 12 months did
some of this work of remembering, of looking
back to push ahead.
“The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop,” an
eponymous retrospective, is currently on view
at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, until February
9, and “Christopher Street,” works by the
artist Sunil Gupta, ran from April 30 to June
1 at the Hales Gallery in West Chelsea (a hardbound
catalog, currently showing as out of
stock at stanleybarker.co.uk , is available from
Amazon ).
Both shows were shot mostly in black and
white, and capture street life in or near Greenwich
Village in the 1970s and early ‘80s. Archival
as much as artistic gems, the two series
are in conversation with one another about that
potent era of sexual freedom and visibility that
Stonewall inaugurated, a period when gay men,
and some determined trans folks, claimed public
space for themselves in this metropolis.
The Baltrop show features 120 photographs
taken between 1969 and 1986. The earliest of
BRONX MUSEUM OF THE ARTS
these were shot while the photographer was
enlisted in the US Navy and capture his fellow
servicemen at ease, as well as some battleship
functions. In subject and composition, these
works prefi gure the much larger corpus that
Baltrop produced following his discharge in
1972 when he found his way to a location in
downtown Manhattan cut off from the straight
world by structural and economic neglect. In
the heady post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS decade,
a network of abandoned, decaying piers with
massive sheds atop them stretched along the
Hudson River below 14th Street. They became
a destination for gay guys to hang out and have
sex. Baltrop trained his lens on this crumbling
haven and its transient denizens in leisure and
lust.
Baltrop’s signature technique was the wideangle
shot. His photographs frequently capture
fi gures — whether solo, or in couples or clusters
— dwarfed by an expansive backdrop of dereliction.
For example, there is the photo of two
naked white men, one backing the camera midstride,
the other hands akimbo looking sideways
towards the lens surrounded by a tangle
of collapsed iron girders and wooden beams.
In various states of undress, Baltrop’s subjects
stroll, stand, sunbathe, fellate, recline, crouch,
watch, and wait.
In the absence of virality, in both human-immunodefi
ciency and social-media senses, men
made different choices then about exposing
themselves. The resulting photographs portray
what the writer Adrian Nicole LeBlanc called
a random family, a collective cobbled together
from different sources and cemented, in this
case, by bodily fl uids.
There is no clearer document in the show of
Baltrop’s inclusion in this family than the closeup
portrait he made of Marsha P. Johnson, the
trans activist and organizer who is said to have
thrown the fi rst bottle in the Stonewall riots. In
Miss Marsha’s eyes we see comfort — she evidently
feels safe posing for this photographer —
but also a question mark. “Who really are you?”
she appears to be thinking.
The essays in the exhibition’s 300-page catalog
describe an intersection of class, isolation,
and race that helps explain why Baltrop, who
died in 2004, remained unrecognized as an
artist during his lifetime. “Baltrop is black, apparently
from the slums of a large northern city
which I infer to be New York,” wrote the military
doctor of then 24-year-old Baltrop, the year of
his Navy discharge.
This retrospective is part of a posthumous
validation of Baltrop’s work by the art establishment.
Pieces of his art have also been acquired
by the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney
Museum of American Art.
The photographs of Sunil Gupta show us
what Baltrop’s lens does not. Gupta draws in
close to his subjects to render them as street
portraits. The artist turned his attention to the
respectable streets of the West Village, particularly
Christopher, the principal gay commercial
artery of the era.
Yet, Gupta’s shots clearly articulate how respectability
itself was being redefi ned. In one
shot, a svelte young man, secure in his fey posture
and gait, walks down a traffi c fi lled street
clad in tiny gym shorts and a sagging hoody
unzipped to reveal his bare chest. Every man’s
“package” is prominently accentuated, in the
style of the day, to act as a live advertisement
for sex.
Whereas Baltrop gives the wide-angle view
of man in his environment, Gupta provides
the close-up man on the street. Where Baltrop
shows the naked gay male animal in a wild industrial
habitat, Gupta shows what those same
animals looked like in clothes fashioned to
make their identities visible to the public. The
wirebound exhibition catalog forfeits analytical
essays, ubiquitous in these books, for as many
images of the series as can possibly fi t, each
printed in a full-page layout. But the story neither
begins nor ends in the photographic images
themselves. Gupta’s trajectory as their
➤ ALVIN BALTROP/ SUNIL GUPTA continued on p.27
December 19, 2019 - January 1, 2 26 020 | GayCityNews.com
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