CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/14/2020

'Alvin Baltrop: The Piers' is a Staff Pick for Pride Month

Featured image is reproduced from Alvin Baltrop: The Piers, collecting the former-sailor-turned-taxi-driver's photographs of the notorious, anonymous NYC cruising spot made 1975–86. Baltrop’s photographs of the piers are "an important, gripping, poignant and often raw series, sitting historically between the Stonewall Riots and the emergence of AIDS in the gay community, and showing a scene long since vanished from New York City," editors James Reid and Tom Watt write in the Introduction. "The images, while sometimes loose and grainy, contain unsettling, powerful scenes—lone figures disappearing into dark spaces, bodies half-glimpsed through windows and doorways, candid male nudes, and clandestine, hardcore sex in mangled metal; and also the darker side of pier life—arson, crime, and death. Ironically it was the powerful content of his photographs which put off most galleries from showing Baltrop’s work during his lifetime, meaning he remained on the fringes of the photographic world until his death, and his images were virtually unseen…"