Baltimore Portraits

"Baltimore Portraits is a rich and stark picture of community: as beautiful as it is ugly, as depressing as it is joyful, as lean as it is full. Badertscher's photographs and their scrawling inscriptions are telling stories that we long to hear (or not hear) but rarely get. By picturing the unpictured, by writing the unsaid, our expectations are meaningfully betrayed." (Carol Mavor, author of Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs.) "These images of many of the denizens of Baltimore's gay "underground" in the 1970s are often deeply disturbing. The literal nakedness of many of the subjects provides only a minimal index of how painfully exposed and vulnerable some of them are. I feel grateful to Amos Badertscher for having produced and preserved these images, and to Tyler Curtain for responsive generosity of his vision of them." (Michael Moon, author of A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol.)