(The gallery provides magnifying glasses so that visitors can better see what’s going on in the modestly sized prints.) Distance not only obscures a subject - giving details over to the imagination, and tapping a different erotic charge altogether - but in Baltrop’s case it also allows for a clear view of the decaying vistas - the fleeting context - surrounding a community that would soon be ravaged by AIDS.Įndlessly ensnared in the cult of cool, the art world paid little attention to Baltrop’s photographs in his lifetime. Baltrop also photographed the heavy action from far away, looking across one pier to another, spying someone in a window, or peering through the collapsing architectures to catch a glimpse of what was taking place inside. (And don’t photographers by nature all like to watch?) When he wasn’t enjoying the illicit pleasures of the piers, he was snapping encounters between its denizens in close-up: intimate portraits of couples kissing, stroking, sucking, and fucking, surely aware of the artist’s presence. Like the images themselves, the exhibition is aching, beautiful, and tender, placing before us that which for some time remained out of sight.īaltrop could be simply labeled a voyeur, but his eye was far more nuanced and un-self-serving than that implies. Art historian Douglas Crimp has curated a selection of Baltrop’s photographs of the piers, all taken between 19, and all printed by the artist, some visibly bearing the wear and tear of time - like delicate monuments to a once-outlawed place and culture that’s since been disappeared from view. It wasn’t the explicit sex that stunned him most it was the danger - the looming threat of violence - and the depressing decrepitude of a huge expanse of space once thriving and necessary to the well-being of the city.įor over a decade, the Bronx-born photographer Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) was a regular visitor to the piers, documenting what he saw there and the ways in which a place left to neglect by New York City became a complicated sanctuary for gay men who found freedom among its ruins. “Don’t think I’ll ever forget that initial sense of shock,” artist and poet David Wojnarowicz wrote in his journal in the summer of 1979 after his first visit to the piers. Though a home for some, it was hardly a safe haven. Left to decay in the 1950s, the piers had by the 1970s become a meeting place where gay men, drag queens, and trans women could socialize, sunbathe, and have sex, all away from the watchful eye of the NYPD. Long before it was a family-friendly public park flanked by luxury condos, the stretch along the West Side Highway between Christopher Street and 14th Street was lined with shipping piers. The LGBTQ Community Center’s Google.West Side centerfold: ”The Piers (man lying down on ledge)“ Courtesy Galerie Buchholz
By introducing autobiographical referents and post-appropriation aesthetics into her practice, Schorr’s ongoing body of work negotiates the fluid nature of authorship and performance in relation to portraiture. Often using her subjects allegorically, Schorr’s work navigates the auspices of identity politics to ask beguiling questions about the nomenclature of selfhood. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Collier Schorr’s early work mined the vernacular of postmodernism to create photographs that toe the line between documentary and fiction. In the aftermath of Stonewall organizers founded hundreds of new LGBTQ civil rights organizations across the country and around the world that drew hundreds of thousands of activists into the fight for equal rights.Īs of 2017 The Stonewall Inn and the Austen House have been designated as national sites of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) history.
Prior to the Stonewall uprising there were little more than two dozen gay rights organizations in the nation’s major cities with a modest number of members.
The uprising marks a key turning point and became a catalyst for the explosive growth of the modern gay rights movement in the United States. It wasn’t the first time LGBTQ people fought back and organized against oppression, but the Stonewall uprising ignited a mass movement that quickly spread across the U.S. What started out as an all-too-routine police raid of the Stonewall Inn gay bar in New York City turned into a multi-night uprising on the streets of Greenwich Village. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, homeless LGBTQ teens, trans women of color, lesbians, drag queens, gay men, and allies all decided to take a stand.