Edited and with text by Valerie Cassel Oliver. Introduction by Douglas Crimp. Forward by Bill Arning.
Published by Contemporary Arts Museum HoustonDreams into Glass accompanies the first major museum exhibition of African-American photographer Alvin Baltrop (1948–2004), whose career unfolded in the late 1960s amid a period of turbulent social and political upheaval. Following a stint in the Navy, Baltrop returned to New York in the 1970s and immersed himself in the city’s decaying landscape, documenting a post-industrial wasteland of vacant manufacturing buildings that included the piers located along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. It was here that Baltrop captured his most iconic images of nocturnal danger and despair alongside intimate and voyeuristic portraits of the homeless, teenage runaways, prostitutes and clandestine sexual encounters. During this period, Baltrop captured Gordon Matta-Clark’s monumental piece “Day’s End” and the work of graffiti artist, Tava, now lost to history. This survey features over three decades of vintage and reprinted photographs as well as archival material--from Baltrop’s intimate portraits of Navy friends and other enlisted men to his poetic body abstractions and street photography to the documentation of an era of gay sexual abandon between the Stonewall riots and the AIDS pandemic.
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