“[A] brilliantly disturbing collection of photographs. . . . It is a hard, frequently painful experience to tour Badertscher’s Baltimore; this is not your mother’s Best of Life Magazine. There is very little triumph here, and a great deal of human tragedy, at least to anyone living a comfortable middle-class existence. However, it is a very important tour to take. No one, after looking at these photographs, will feel quite the same about his or her ‘privileged’ world again.” — Art &Understanding
“Badertscher is clearly performing the necessary task of chronicling a constantly threatened American subculture. This chronicle often takes the form of a narrative and visual tribute to people who are proudly and flamboyantly off-center. The photographs imply a collaborative quest between artist and subject for the pose and gesture that will most symbolically reveal a personality—or more specifically, reveal the anger, humor, morbidity, despair, lostness, shyness, hunger, creepiness, fearfulness, confusion, and elegance of that personality. . . . Integral to the conceptual life of the photographs are the text inscriptions that underlie and sometimes surround them. . . . [T]hey complicate and humanize the photographer, who, by providing the details of lives . . . as well as brief psychological evaluations, exclamatory tributes, and poetic epitaphs, serves the role of a village historian whose act of remembering tenders the gift of recognition to those who have been denied any significant portion of the public space. . . . Before our eyes, before Badertscher’s eyes, appreciation has turned into memorial. This is indeed a complicated work.” — The Independent Weekly (Durham NC)
“Badertscher’s work . . . helps enlarge our sympathies as human beings. By any definition, that is art of a high order.” — baltimore gay paper
“In Baltimore Portraits, photographer and Baltimore native Amos Badertscher gives us a view of ‘Charm City’ through a lens that crosses Diane Arbus with Robert Mapplethorpe. . . . The beautifully composed and printed black and white portraits contrast the grim lives of people on the margins—young street hustlers, prostitutes, and drug users—with a few local underground celebrities, drag queens, and self-portraits thrown in to soften the blow. . . . [T]he images in Baltimore Portraits appear to be reality in its purest form.” — The Washington Blade
“Baltimore Portraits is a rich and stark picture of community: as beautiful as it is ugly, as depressing as it is joyful, as lean as it is full. Badertscher’s photographs and their scrawling inscriptions are telling stories that we long to hear (or not hear) but rarely get. By picturing the unpictured, by writing the unsaid, our expectations are meaningfully betrayed.” — Carol Mavor, author of Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs
“These images of many of the denizens of Baltimore’s gay ‘underground’ in the 1970s are often deeply disturbing. The literal nakedness of many of the subjects provides only a minimal index of how painfully exposed and vulnerable some of them are. I feel grateful to Amos Badertscher for having produced and preserved these images, and to Tyler Curtain for the responsive generosity of his vision of them.” — Michael Moon, author of A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol