Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman

(link)

These photos are lovely now as Baltrop receives his late laurels. It wasn't laureled then. A suffering that is made into "authenticity." Pain as sales value added. The valorization process of art. "hardship reclaimed like wood by collectors of such." Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims "look a dandelion has grown," hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete. A mythos of suffering starts to feel like instructions for it.

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Daniel Buchholz, Purvis Young at James Fuentes

Alvin Baltrop at Daniel Buchholz

(link)

Rose colored lenses of nostalgia, a scene depicted as the fantasy it was desired to be, but the reticence or demureness in some of Baltrop's early voyeurism shouldn't be mistaken for anything but caution. His situation's precarity, a gay black man in the 1970s, is expressed on the surface of the photographs themselves, in its tentativeness, his body's extreme vulnerability. People threatened, murdered. A gay haven was habitually brutal. These people were killed, ostracized, displaced to the corners, to escape the purview of a society disavowing them. You see it in the photo's trembling hand.



See too: AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni