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This is the work of African American photographer, Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004). Alvin photographed the gay community at the piers lining Manhattan’s west side in the 1970s. Pier 48 was then an abandoned wooden structure where gay men met to socialise and have sex.
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Alvin didn’t achieve commercial success with this art during his lifetime. He was a poor man who struggled with poverty and often couldn’t pay his rent. He made his money mostly through odd jobs, but photography was his passion.
Born in the Bronx, Alvin’s mother was a devout Jehovah’s Witness who hated his art and regularly threw it away. Eventually, Alvin left home and served in the navy during the Vietnam war. He started taking portraits of sailors during this time.
He eventually returned to New York to study art in 1973. This was a New York just after Stonewall, but before the HIV crisis took hold. Gay subculture was changing rapidly, and Alvin began recording it with his camera.
Alvin had relationships with men and women but never really put a label on his sexuality. He disliked the word “bisexual” because, according to his friend Randal Wilcox, Alvin felt it sounded fake. He preferred being called “gay” to being called “bisexual”
His images ranged from men having sex in the dilapidated buildings along the pier, to the homeless community, and New Yorkers just out for a walk. He also photographed Marsha P Johnson, one of the leading activists for LGBTQ rights and a Stonewall veteran
Alvin only had a handful of exhibitions during his lifetime, mostly in bars and gay clubs. According to Randal Wilcox, gay art galleries were the most unreceptive to the late photographer’s work. He wrote...
'Al Baltrop endured constant racism from gay curators, gallery owners and other members of the ‘gay community’ until his death. Many of these people doubted that Baltrop shot his own photographs; some implied or directly told him that he stole the work of a white photographer'.
Alvin could not afford health insurance and when he was diagnosed with cancer he didn’t get the treatment he needed and he passed away in a veteran’s hospital.
In 2008, four years after his death, Artforum critic Douglas Crimp wrote about Alvin’s work and brought it to a new audience https://www.artforum.com/print/200802/alvin-baltrop-pier-photographs-1975-1986-19341
In 2012, the Contemporary Art Museum Houston held a solo exhibition of Alvin's work titled Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass. In 2015, a book of Alvin’s work titled ‘The Piers’ was published by TF Editores.
In 2019, a major exhibition of his work was held at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. http://www.bronxmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-life-and-times-of-alvin-baltrop
But the sudden recognition of Alvin’s work has not gone uncriticised. Wilcox said, 'The losers who rejected him or would have rejected him had they known him are now trying to canonize him as some kind of hero. In short, now that Al is dead, they are willing to accept him'.
Osa Atoe wrote 'Alvin’s story reconfirms my belief that people of color & queer people desperately need our own independent media to cover our own work...Mainstream white-owned media won’t cover our art unless it matches up with their stereotypes of us' https://www.colorlines.com/articles/alvin-baltrop
You can read more about Alvin and where his work is exhibited at the Alvin Baltrop Trust. http://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-trust
