Trust Me

Alvin Baltrop’s images reveal the intertwined communities of gay men cruising, transgender people, sunbathers, artists, and the unhoused who found refuge—if not safety—within the architectural disarray of the then crumbling Hudson River piers, some of which still stand near the Whitney’s current location. Baltrop frequented this area while working as a self employed mover to support himself after serving in the Vietnam War. Naked bodies, often engaged in sex, appear at a distance (as in this image) or perform close to the camera. Baltrop sometimes hung suspended from a harness to make photographs surreptitiously, and at other times worked collaboratively with his subjects—mostly gay men like himself. The art historian Douglas Crimp has written about the era of the piers pictured here (roughly 1975 to 1986): “The complexity of Baltrop’s legacy resides not only in the record his photographs provide of utopian and dystopian occurrences, but also in their evidence that the moment in Manhattan’s history when we could so thoroughly reinvent ourselves was as precarious as the places where we did it."