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Introduction

By Gary Scharfman

Amos Badertscher is a self-confessed paradox; you have an equal chance of finding him sequestered in his Baltimore digs contentedly reading Joyce and Proust or wandering through that city's tenderloin in search of subjects to photograph. Now just past sixty years old, Badertscher has for the better part of the past quarter century documented the drag queens, hustlers, runaways, and drug users precariously living on society's fringe in his native city.

Badertscher did not begin photographing with the intention of creating a testament of what is almost universally considered to be an unsavory world. Rather, it evolved as he became more willing to openly record all facets of his own life. That said, the reader would be mistaken to make any assumption about the models depicted in this book. For Badertscher is as likely to ask (and get) the fellow packing his groceries at the supermarket to platonically model for him as the hustler who comes at a price.

He is a shy and impatient man easily exasperated by the mundane demands of daily life. However, when in pursuit of a subject to photograph, Badertscher is intrepid. This trait, combined with an unflagging preoccupation with how his subjects are ultimately captured on paper, has resulted in a vast and riveting collection of images.

Badertscher is a self-taught photographer. He credits a fellow faculty member at a prep school where he was a mathematics teacher with awakening in him the medium's possibilities. According to Badertscher: "This teacher, who had a lot of background in photography, got right up to the subject, all the while managing to relax the model; what got me was to see all that personality captured in film."

To this day Badertscher's preferred photographic technique is rapid, unrehearsed sessions. He does not see himself as a photographer who visualizes or plans things out in advance. Badertscher relies on instinct and what he considers to be the many possibilities presented to him in the darkroom.

A modest inheritance from his parents in 1975 enabled Badertscher to fully concentrate his energies on photography. What increasingly interested him as subjects were friends, hustlers, and the wonderfully outrageous people who populated the expanding number of gay bars that sprouted up in Baltimore since the sixties. He readily acknowledges: "From my family's point of view it was a wasted life, but from mine it was very gratifying. My few crazy friends loved the photography; which fed my ego and kept me going. And then, what else was I going to do?"

For the better part of the next twenty years his work was ignored. "During this time the images I was amassing grew into a photographic chronicle not only of myself but of a world easily invisible to the mainstream sensibility. I wish I could think of a more vicious way to describe this convenient blindness but I can't."

In the eighties or nineties, as AIDS took its toll, the world Badertscher recorded vanished. To him, Baltimore's hustler scene has devolved into something sadder and more desperate; the bars are now "politically corrected" and undistinguished.

By 1993, he was resigned to putting up his home for sale. One of the prospects whom the real estate agent brought over was Michael Mezzatesta, the director of the Duke University Museum of Art, who was considering relocating to Baltimore from North Carolina. Mezzatesta and his wife toured through the rooms which over the years had become packed with Badertscher's photography.

It turned out that the director did not buy the house and he and his wife did not relocate to Baltimore. What the director did do was offer and then mount a one-man exhibition of Badertscher's work at the Duke University Museum of Art in 1995. This was to be the first in what is becoming long-overdue validation for the artist and his work, of which this book can offer but a glimpse.


Gary Scharfman
Managing Director, DEGEN-SCHARFMAN
New York City


To e-mail the artist or inquire about original prints, send a note to DEGENSCHAR@aol.com.





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