Amos Badertscher’s crucial capturing of Baltimore’s queer underground

While many dream of living freely as an artist, few have the means to walk the path less travelled. Half a century ago, Amos Badertscher (1936−2023) decided to do just this after his father passed in 1973. He invested the inheritance in himself, using it to build a life where he could live comfortably, if modestly, as a photographer without having to sell any work. 

Badertscher took up photography during the mid-’60s while working as a teacher in his hometown of Baltimore, and quickly became devoted to the male figure at a time when the sale and distribution of full-frontal nudity was still illegal. His home readily doubled as a studio and darkroom, creating a sanctuary where he could explore the spaces where art, photography, sexuality, and intimacy are born. 

Living outside the boundaries of society, Badertscher came to relish all that was clandestine about the pre-Stonewall era, when being queer was criminalised and forbidden. He sought out private moments with people from other worlds living on the fringes: the city’s hustlers, prostitutes, go-go dancers, drag queens, and club kids. Amos also picked up hitchhikers, learning their histories and handwriting memories on the margins of the prints. 

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“There is something about Baltimore that allows idiosyncratic individuals to thrive and flourish. Amos would repeatedly say that the scene he witnessed on the streets and in the bars couldn’t have occurred anywhere else,” says curator Hunter O’Hanian, who first met Badertscher a decade ago, while working as Director of the Leslie-Lohan Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York. 

Now O’Hanian honours the artist’s life and legacy with Amos Badertscher Images and Stories (Monacelli), the first career survey of the American original. Organised into three sections – Visage (portraits), Nightlife (made at bars and clubs), and Mirrors (images made with mirrors in which Badertscher frequently appears) – Badertscher’s photographs and stories spill from the pages like a deluge unleashed. 

“I think what drove him was a desire to find himself. Amos learned early on that he could do this through photographs of others,” O’Hanian says. He would make photographs while out in clubs and at the bars, or meet people on the street, invite them back to his home where they would spend the night. The next morning, they did a photo session around 10am, then Badertscher would drive them home. 

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But for Badertscher, the silent image never could fully convey the depths of the people’s whole likeness they portrayed. He wrote their stories on the edges of the print, and once he stopped making new works, he revised and updated the stories with new information he secured, working diligently on the book in his first-floor railroad flat of an old row house in the Charles Village in north Baltimore during his final years. 

“Amos’s essential role in shaping queer culture was to create a record – both visually and in writing – of the lives of some people in the community from 1965 to 2005. By documenting the community, without apology, he gave it credence, verifying its existence,” O’Hanian says. “[At the same time] Amos was searching for parts of himself, and for something else that I don’t think he found. Maybe it had something to do with his own experience, or maybe it was lost youth. He was seeking out things that were out of his reach.”

Amos Badertscher Images and Stories is published by Monacelli.

Miss Rosen is a free­lance arts and pho­tog­ra­phy writer, fol­low her on X.

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