“[A] brilliantly disturbing collection of photographs. . . . No one . . . will feel quite the same about his or her ‘privileged’ world again.” --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“[A] brilliantly disturbing collection of photographs. . . . It is a hard, frequently painful experience to tour Badertscher’s Baltimore; this is not your mother’s Best of Life Magazine. There is very little triumph here, and a great deal of human tragedy, at least to anyone living a comfortable middle-class existence. However, it is a very important tour to take. No one, after looking at these photographs, will feel quite the same about his or her ‘privileged’ world again.”
--Art &Understanding
“Badertscher’s work . . . helps enlarge our sympathies as human beings. By any definition, that is art of a high order.”
--baltimore gay paper
“Badertscher is clearly performing the necessary task of chronicling a constantly threatened American subculture. This chronicle often takes the form of a narrative and visual tribute to people who are proudly and flamboyantly off-center. The photographs imply a collaborative quest between artist and subject for the pose and gesture that will most symbolically reveal a personality—or more specifically, reveal the anger, humor, morbidity, despair, lostness, shyness, hunger, creepiness, fearfulness, confusion, and elegance of that personality. . . . Integral to the conceptual life of the photographs are the text inscriptions that underlie and sometimes surround them. . . . [T]hey complicate and humanize the photographer, who, by providing the details of lives . . . as well as brief psychological evaluations, exclamatory tributes, and poetic epitaphs, serves the role of a village historian whose act of remembering tenders the gift of recognition to those who have been denied any significant portion of the public space. . . . Before our eyes, before Badertscher’s eyes, appreciation has turned into memorial. This is indeed a complicated work.”
--The Independentt Weekly (Durham, NC)
“In Baltimore Portraits, photographer and Baltimore native Amos Badertscher gives us a view of ‘Charm City’ through a lens that crosses Diane Arbus with Robert Mapplethorpe. . . . The beautifully composed and printed black and white portraits contrast the grim lives of people on the margins—young street hustlers, prostitutes, and drug users—with a few local underground celebrities, drag queens, and self-portraits thrown in to soften the blow. . . . [T]he images in Baltimore Portraits appear to be reality in its purest form.”
--The Washington Blade
“[A] fascinating pictorial account of some of Badertscher’s Baltimore subjects. . . . [A] very powerful snapshot of what was, is now, and always will be as long as mankind lives on this earth. This is true documentary photography. . . .”
--AIDS Book Review Journal
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