Alvin Baltrop

Modern Art is proud to be able to exhibit a group of Alvin Baltrop’s (1948-2004) photographs taken at the piers. Small in scale, usually between ten and thirty centimetres in length, Baltrop’s images are largely black and white, interspersed with a few colour prints. The subjects of these photographs are sometimes the cavernous, dilapidated warehouse structures themselves, seemingly empty of people and life. But more often Baltrops’s camera fixes on figures — mostly men — engaged, unselfconsciously, in action of various kinds: sunbathers luxuriating on the wooden docks, couples embracing at a distance. In other images the subjects appear more performative: portraits of his friends or lovers pose in various states of undress, and couples engage in explicit sex acts, seemingly for Baltrop’s camera. But pleasure and the sensuality of bodies are countered with scenes of poverty, destitution and even death, pictured for instance, in a group of police officers surrounding a washed up corpse, or a young man in a tent, perhaps homeless. A significant historical document into a period of New York’s cultural subcultural and political history, the piers photographs are also glimpses into moments of intimacy and community made visible through Baltrop’s artistic conviction, vision and rigor.

‘Baltrop’s photographs portray the “joyous situation” Matta-Clark said he wanted to achieve there; and they constitute rare and indispensable evidence of the proximity and simultaneity of artistic and sexual experimentation in the declining industrial spaces of Manhattan during the 1970s, a time of particularly creative ferment for both scenes’ - Douglas Crimp

'Baltrop’s moody and atmospheric images relay the architectural disintegration of the waterfront spaces in the mid-1970s, gorgeous ramshackle ruins in their vastness and dereliction; spaces that host infinite possibilities for those who gathered there, whether to their demise or to the benefit of their encounters with others, always fraught, fragile, and fungible.’ - Adrienne Edwards

‘Although initially terrified of the piers, I began to take these photos as a voyeur [and] soon grew determined to preserve the frightening, mad, unbelievable, violent, and beautiful things that were going on at that time.’ - Alvin Baltrop

'Baltrop’s view was neither judgmental nor sensational; it was unflinching and it could be tender as he identified with what his eyes beheld. In dedicating himself to a portrayal of life on the piers, he understood that his work was important for posterity.’ - Allen Frame