Emily Roysdon & Alvin Baltrop

Emily Roysdon and Alvin Baltrop, West Street

Published in New York, NY: Printed Matter Inc. 2010

This accordion book features Emily Roysdon recent photographic work inserted into a collection of black and white images taken by Alvin Baltrop in the 1970s and 80s. The industrial architecture of New York's Hudson River piers is the location for both sets of photographs.

In the 1970's the Hudson River in Manhattan became a conduit and locus for artistic experimentation. While Gordon Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, Dan Graham and many others produced collaborative and multidisciplinary works that radically challenged artistic traditions, Alvin Baltrop (1948 – 2004) turned his camera to a phenomenon that has been rarely documented and written about—the precarious lives of the individuals who gathered and lived at the piers up until their demolition in the late 80s. Baltrop captured intimate portraits of friends, lovers, and strangers; homeless people, runaways and murder victims, sexual encounters; as well as the decaying architecture and the landscape of a Manhattan that no longer exists.

Roysdon views this book as part of her ongoing interest in the cultural history of the piers and an opportunity to reflect on Baltrop's spectacular, and unheralded oeuvre of photographs. Along with the collection of folding images, the book contains a text by Roysdon as an extended meditation on these ideas that reverberate through the photographic pairing and the historic context of the Baltrop works.