The work of black gay African American photographer Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) will be shown in the UK for the very first time at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool from Saturday, December 7 to February 9, 2014.
This work, which was never shown in the US until after Baltrop’s death and is now widely recognised and appreciated in the US art world, will be shown at The Piers From Here, which focuses on the self-taught photographer, who after leaving the US Navy took on various dead-end jobs before becoming a removals man.
The job enabled him to camp out in his van for days on end around Manhattan’s abandoned shipping piers during the mid-70s and 80s, where he photographed men engaged in sex shot from the distance or through a doorway; men happy to become exhibitionists for the camera; men and women Baltrop came to know at the piers; guys cruising for sex; people just strolling about; graffiti; and gruesome corpses dredged up from the river. Most of all, Baltrop photographed the piers themselves, right up to the moment they were razed.
Aside from their aesthetic value, Baltrop’s photos present a remarkable record of a turning point in the sexual revolution of that period, and the decaying architecture and landscape of a Manhattan that no longer exists.
The exhibition will also feature the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, sculptor, filmmaker and photographer, who illegally entered and took over Pier 52, a huge corrugated iron structure, and, to put it in Gordon’s words, “completely overrun by the gays”. There he created one of his famous ‘cuts’ entitled Day’s End, a spectacular anti-monumental intervention brought to life by the rotation of the sun, which entered the building, thus reflecting in the water of the Hudson River.
The Art Forum said: “Perhaps more than Matta-Clark could have imagined, 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.”
Event: Alvin Baltrop and Gordon Matta-Clark: The Piers From Here
Where: Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool
When: Saturday, December 7 to February 9, 2014
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