West Street

With this handsomely printed accordion book, Emily Roysdon insinuates her own recent photographic work into a collection of black and white images taken by Alvin Baltrop in the 1970s and 80s. The setting for both sets of photographs is the deteriorating industrial architecture of New York’s Hudson River piers, where intrepid young gay men and women would come after dark to explore, create public artworks, and have sex within its abandoned office and warehouse spaces.

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. [publishers’ note]

Signed & numbered.