Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront

by Fiona Anderson

Gordon Matta-Clark’s vast cutting work Day’s End, in the summer of 1975 (figure 1.2). The men Baltrop depicts are white, African-American, Latinx, and of various ages (figure 1.3). Sex is not always immediately discernible. We have to cruise the images for clues. In some, pairs or groups of men are partially obscured behind steel frames or warehouse walls, the photographer’s gaze paralleling the stealth of the cruising act (figure 1.4). An image of a shirtless young man peering through a gaping hole in a warehouse wall plays with the notion of the frame and, again, of voyeurism (on the wall is a drawing by the graffiti artist Tava; figure 1.5). As we, the viewers, observe this young man from behind, scouring the frame for the erotic action that he appears to be seeking, we become involved in a kind of cruising ourselves. Sometimes this inquisitive, eroticized looking uncovers social encounters that are not sexual; the life on the piers documented in Baltrop’s photographs is sometimes solitary. The artist Emily Roysdon remarked in 2011 on being struck that Baltrop “has hundreds of pictures of people sitting out on the piers alone reading. There were all kinds of things going on there and I am more broadly