Amos Badertscher Images and Stories [Hardcover]

The long-awaited first career survey from photographer Amos Badertscher, who comprehensively documented a uniquely American queer underworld

Across several decades, self-taught photographer Amos Badertscher (19362023) made thousands of photographs of a liminal queer world: young male sex workers, drag performers, trans pioneers, and Baltimore, Marylands inclusive, ribald nightlife. The encounters with these marginalized figures helped Badertscher understand his own queer identity and reveal a confident body of work that stakes out an important corner of queer art and aesthetics.

Made between the 1960s and early 2000s, the photographs featured here constitute an unparalleled chronicle of a culture of the era particular not only to Badertschers hometown, but universally identifiable, one which began to fade with the movement of LGBTQ+ rights and liberation. The hundreds of images are accompanied by Badertschers writings about the history and experiences of his subjects, further illuminating the intimate inner lives of people who were frequently dismissed, feared, and objectified by mainstream culture.Amos Badertscher Images and Storiesis a landmark introduction to a figure who is now finally receiving his due as a major twentieth-century portraitist and chronicler of queer subculture.

Hunter OHanianis a curator and former executive director of the Stonewall National Museum and Archives and director of Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York.

Jonathan D. Katz?is?Associate Professor of?Practice in the?History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Womens Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, curator ofThe First Homosexualsat Wrightwood 659 Gallery in Chicago, and author of?About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art?(2024)?and editor of?The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a Global Identity 18691939?(2025), both published by?Monacelli.

Beth Saundersis curatl£&