'Maybe unbeknownst to him, there was an idea of an archive, of documentation. I don’t know if at the time he was aware of that, but now you look back and you have this unbelievable archive of those piers.”
In December of 1973, a section of the West Side Elevated Highway between Little West 12th and Gansevoort Streets, in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, collapsed under the weight of an asphalt truck, permanently closing the highway south of the accident.
The photographer Alvin Baltrop, born in 1948 in the Bronx, had recently returned to New York from a stint in the Navy when he came across the West Side Piers. In the Navy he had photographed his fellow soldiers, using sick trays to develop his photos. It was at the piers, though, where his photography became all-consuming.
Many have drawn comparisons between Baltrop and Robert Mapplethorpe, both male photographers who documented and participated in gay culture in the 1970s . But Sergio Bessa, the Director of Curatorial Programs at the Bronx Museum, says that Baltrop’s work stands out for his departure from classical photography. “I think [Baltrop’s] work was more personal, it’s very diaristic,” Bessa says. “Maybe unbeknownst to him, there was an idea of an archive, of documentation.
There is a tenderness to Baltrop’s photos, and even decades after the West Side Elevated Highway was finally demolished, the beauty of the eroding buildings and life on the piers that Baltrop photographed feels intimate. “There is a lot of longing, there is a lot of lust,” Bessa says of Baltrop’s work. “But it’s not like when you see a porn magazine or anything like that.
Below, Bessa talks us through a selection of photos in the upcoming exhibit, from Baltrop’s days in the Navy to his famous portrait of activist and drag queen Marsha P. Johnson.“That’s a portrait of Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha has became such an icon in the past few years. Now we would call her a transgender activist, but she was basically homeless, like a lot of people in the ‘70s. Marsha was kind of a big activist at that time.
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