BALTIMORE, MD.- UMBC's Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents the exhibition Lost Boys: Amos Badetscher’s Baltimore, opening on August 30 and closing on December 15, 2023.

Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore is the first career retrospective of artist Amos Badertscher in the United States. Between the 1960s and 2005, Badertscher (American, 1936–2023) documented hustlers, club kids, go-go dancers, drag queens, drug addicts, friends, and lovers who were part of LGBTQ+ life in Baltimore. A self-taught photographer, Badertscher worked on the fringes of the polite society into which he was born as an upper-middle class white Baltimorean. “Breaking all the rules of documentary photography,” as he stated, he developed a signature style of spare portraits staged in his home studio.

Taking his camera into the city’s clubs and gay bars, Badertscher recorded the shifting geographies and personalities of queer Baltimore pre-Stonewall and through the height of the AIDS epidemic. In the early 2000s, he captured the urban decay, economic devastation, and rampant drug use of sex workers in the city’s post-industrial landscape, in a body of work foregrounding aspects of Baltimore’s queer history that have rarely been acknowledged. Badertscher returned repeatedly to his personal photographic archive, inscribing his prints with handwritten notes on his subjects’ personal histories, filtered through his own recollections. This exhibition explores the power dynamics and desires embedded in his photographs, which memorialize people often marginalized by society.

The exhibition is curated by Beth Saunders, Curator and Head of Special Collections & Gallery at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, with contributions from consulting curators Hunter O’Hanian (Independent Curator) and Jonathan Katz (University of Pennsylvania).

The Artist

Known for his haunting and powerful portraits of people he met on the streets of Baltimore and in its nightclubs, lifelong Baltimore resident Amos Badertscher created stark, yet imaginative depictions of his subjects from the late 1960s through the early 2000s. Most of his work is now housed in two of the leading LGBTQ historical cultural institutions: the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, and the One Archive in Los Angeles.

Badertscher graduated from the Friends School of Baltimore in 1955 and from Union College in Schenectady, New York, in 1959 with a degree in English literature and history.

His first significant visibility did not occur until 1995, when the Duke University Museum of Art presented a one-person exhibition, and Duke University Press printed a survey of his work in Baltimore Portraits (1999). His work has subsequently been featured in major exhibitions in New York, Berlin, San Francisco, and Chicago.

Advisory: This exhibition contains images of full frontal nudity, sexual content, and drug use.

UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
"Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher's Baltimore"
August 30th, 2023 - December 15th, 2023

https://