Amos Badertscher

Amos Badertscher was born 1938 in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a self-taught photographer working exclusively in black and white, analog photography. He is considered to be the chronicler of Baltimore's subculture and gay scene in the 1970s and 1980s.

Badertscher attended the Friends School of Baltimore, a Quaker institution. After attending Union College in Schenectady, 1955 to 1959, Badertscher worked as a mathematics teacher. In the early 1960s, a colleague introduced him to photography, soon Badertscher was selling his prints of nude teens (some his models were his students) to soft-core magazines like Buck, Drum and Golden Boys. In 1975, a modest inheritance put Badertscher in the position to concentrate entirely on photography.

Badertscher became interested in the gay sub-culture of Baltimore. Drag Queens, hustlers, runaways and drug addicts are his models. Badertscher worked silently for twenty years before being discovered. He wanted to sell his house and one of the buyers was Nannerl O. Keohane, the President of Duke University. He considered relocating to Baltimore and saw Badgertscher's photographs during a tour of the house. Although Keohane did not purchase the house, she organized an exhibition for Badertscher at the Duke University Museum of Art. Later, a book was created; numerous exhibitions followed.

Badertscher is today the chronicler of the gay scene in Baltimore. His pictures are sometimes sexually explicit without ever becoming pornographic. One sees compassion for the model Badertscher' works, but also wit and irony. In many pictures Badertscher is a photographer and co-model, photographing in a mirror. The handwritten biographical notes and comments on his panels show Badertscher as a socially critical and compassionate photographer. His foreword to the book Baltimore Portraits is an indictment of social conditions in America and of morality that leads to the persecution and prohibition of the work of his colleagues such as Will McBride. He places himself here in the series of the attacked with McBride, Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, Peter Hujar, Larry Clark and David Hamilton.

According to Gary Scharfman, Badertscher takes photographs quickly, unprepared and in series. He relies on his instinct for the right moment and the possibilities of the darkroom. His photos seldom have a background, they are concentrated and deliberately not anthropological. The models are never objectified, but the photo allows them to speak in the first person, and that's exactly what makes his work representational of what it is to gay in America. The Badertscher's aesthetic, informed by the culture of the 1970s and 1980s, are considered avant garde.

Amos Badertscher has been sharply attacked for his photographic work by the religious right in the United States, especially Pat Robertson and the Family Research Council. After years of attacks by the religious right and other morality groups, Badertscher has abandoned photography and dedicates himself to his collection of rare photography books. He continues to live in Baltimore.