Jerry Flack, one of IGW's most visited reviewers has given us a survey of "coffee table" books as well as a review of Reed Massengill's Self-Exposure: The Male Nude Self-Portrait

Be sure to let Jerry know how much it's costing you to keep up with all these coffee table books, here.
SelfExposureSelf-Exposure: The Male Nude Self-Portrait

by Reed Massengill
Universe, 2005
Harcover 160 pages, $39.95
ISBN: 0789313170

INTRODUCTION:

Throughout the past year this reviewer has focused upon books of art that the IGW editor has come to refer to as the “coffee table genre.” These volumes feature paintings, drawings, sculptures, and other fine art media, but primarily have accentuated photographic images of the nude or semi-nude male. (One felicitous exception is Peter Kuhnst’s Physique: Classic Photograph of Naked Athletes (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004). Kuhnst provides nude woman athletes side by side with male athletic models, both in posed and action photography plus the inclusion of the works of female photographers, both past and present, such as Sylvie Blum, Annie Leibovitz, Selma Genthe, and Leni Riefenstahl.

Although the vast majority of these beautiful books focus upon the male nude, the images are by professional artists of world renown such as Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and David Hockney, and are clearly to be viewed as art rather than pornography. The intent of the artists is clearly the presentation of the all-encompassing beauty of the complete human body, male or female, as a majestic subject.

This series of reviews of nude and semi-nude art photography began with an examination of handsome and virile sailors of decades past in Evan Bachner’s At Ease: Navy Men of World War II (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2004). It seems impossible when viewing such realistic black-and-white photographic images that these brawny, muscular handsome sailors (at work and at play) carrying out life-saving orders, joyfully showering, giving each other massages or enjoying nude bathing at an old mill in Corsica are now mostly likely dead or in their final years of life. The photographer commrades of their youth captured them at their heoric best.

Another stunningly beautiful volume reviewed in these pages is Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude by Justin Spring (New York: Universe, 2002). Cadmus was easily one of the great figural artists of the 20th century. For more than six decades he lived openly as a gay man and produced an unmatched oeuvre of nude male drawings in a range of media that includes chalk, pencil, crayon, watercolor, charcoal, and egg tempera often rendered on hand-toned paper.

A particular triumph of male nude photography may be found in the pages of Bondi Classic (New York: Cowboy Mouth, 2003) that particularly displays the erotic beach photography of Australian blue magazine photographer Paul Freeman. The sexual male potency of Freeman’s virile subjects is his choice of sports heroes, Olympians, and actors rather than studio models. Freeman chooses his landscapes, most especially the beautiful but craggy and rocky Australian coastline, to best match and present his ruggedly handsome male subjects.

In the July, 2005 issue of IGW, four uniquely different volumes of male nude art were reviewed under the banner title, “Eye Candy.” The paintings of contemporary pop artist Joe Phillips were celebrated for their neon vividness, sexual daring, and genuine wit in his work For The Boys (Berlin, Germany: Bruno Gmunder, 2004). “Eye Candy” also celebrated Howard Roffman’s candid and gorgeous images of his young male model in Pictures of Kris (Berlin, Germany: Bruno Gmunder, 2002) and the Swedish male images of Benno Thoma’s Absolute Sweden (Berlin, Germany: Bruno Gmunder, 2002). The “Eye Candy” tribute concluded with a review of the author of this current work, Reed Massengill’s monograph, The Male Ideal: Lon of New York and the Masculine Physique (New York: Universe Publishing, 2004), a tribute that both revealed and honored the seminal nude and semi-nude images of pioneer photographer Alonzo Hanagan who especially created the images of physical culture photography in the decades from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Two additional “coffee table genre’ books of astonishing beauty that have been featured are nearly as new as Self-Exposure. Jonathan Weinberg’s Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams) is a splendid history of the male body as portrayed in a myriad of art media for at least the past 120 years. Handsomely produced by one of the premier book publishers in the world, Male Desire, is easily a contender for the gay male book of the year. It is sumptuous in appearance, erudite in scholarship, exceptionally generous in its wealth of male images, and just plain gorgeous to view. Moreover, its compendium of images of the great male nude photographers, painters, and sculptors is conclusive beyond any shadow of doubt that gay art has a long and distinguished history. In a very true sense, although not so organized, Male Desire is an encyclopedia of gay male art. The prime contender for the mythic award, “gay male book of the year” has to be the most recent book of male nude photography also reviewed by this author, Locker Room Nudes: Dieux du Stade (Stadium Gods) The French National Rugby Team (New York: Universe Publishing, 2005). What began as a whimsical but sexy calendar featuring France’s premier Rugby players moved on to become a work of art with Francois Rousseau’s unobtrusive photographs of erotic, ravishingly raw male sexuality. No studio models here. Cocky, brash, tough, intensely competitive men are displayed in arousing photography that accentuates the masculine features of great sportsmen.


SELF-EXPOSURE:

Reed Massengill is an exceptional versatile writer who has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, has authored biographies, corporate histories, and has created numerous volumes of male photography including the previously cited monograph, The Male Ideal: Lon of New York and the Masculine Physique (New York: Universe Publishing, 2004). Massengill has developed a unique reputation for his study of the history of gay male photography. He collects vintage male nude photographs and is most likely the premier expert in that field of inquiry living and working today. He is a remarkable talent who has not only admired the daring of past photographers (who with their very act of taking photographs of male nude models not only violated cultural and societal taboos, but actually broke the laws of their times. Many such male nude photographers as Lon of New York saw their life work trashed and burned by homophobic police officials.) Now, with the publication of Self-Exposure, Massengill appears to have gained the courage of those who have gone before and charts new territory himself.

Self-Exposure: The Male Nude Self-Portrait is a ground-breaking idea and Massengill never hesitates to invite photographers to push the concept to the limit. The photographer is being as intimate with both the camera and the viewer as he can be. The objectivity of the photography as objective artist is stripped or removed from the equation. The artist-model-viewer is sharply dissected into a new paradigm. The artist and the viewer have eliminated “the middle man” be he a dandy of the past, a porn star of the 1970s, or a rugged athlete of today’s French Rugby fields or Australian beaches. The photographers ARE the models. Different viewers may not know how to respond. They may feel uncomfortable with the intimacy. Are they on a voyage into the world of artistic self-portraiture and a brand new artistic perspective or are they being forced by the presence of the photographer’s self-images into becoming mere voyeurs?

To create Self-Exposure, Massengill collected photographs of both established and rising talents in the field of nude photography to create photographic nude self-portraits. Many of the photographs were culled from the portfolios of great male nude photographers who are no longer alive. Remarkable talents such Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol are from the recent past, but Massengill, the historian, also prints Hippolyte Bayard’s “The Portrait of a Drowned Man,” created in France in 1840, and almost certainly the oldest photographic nude self-image in existence anywhere. He likewise reveals an incredible montage of self-portraiture titled “Circle of Thomas Eakins, Naked Series,” that boldly demonstrates that one of America’s greatest artists photographed himself nude in multiple images as early as 1883. Hence, one of the true virtues of Massengill’s latest work is that it provides an introduction to the world of male nude photography. Another virtue of having so many images is the demonstration or revelation of creative self-expression. No two self-portraits are similar. Nearly one hundred artist photographed themselves from fundamentally varied and highly creative points of view. Although a few photographers are represented by more than one image, most are captured in one self-image.

The design of the book is excellent. The cover of Self-Exposure, John Eric’s “Falling” is exquisitely beautiful, reproduced in the burnished color of a Rembrandt painting and is matched (at least) by an exquisite double-page spread of Eric’s “Side View Reclining.”  Both on the cover and within the pages of the book Eric’s use of color and light, and his gently yet erotically curved body figure could not be more romanticized or gorgeous to view. The size of the book is near perfect, large enough to present images that clearly capture the attention of readers, but not so large and cumbersome that one requires table space to truly enjoy the views. The black-and-white photographs are reproduced as razor-sharp images and the sepia and full-color images are equally superb reproductions. Every plate is handsomely printed. Added touches that immediately catch the attention of the reader are plates 1 and 2, the dramatic contrast of side-by-side, full-page nude images of photographer Yann Amstutz, one crisply black-and-white and the other in near Technicolor splendor. The contrast is carried further. The “dark” image of Amstutz is shot in a shaded daylight rural setting while the color photo is rendered at night with both the backlighting of the neon-lit urban center and a flash highlighting the handsome nude body of the photographer in all his masculine glory. Clearly, Universe Publishing cared that this book carry with it the same character of intense and superior images of a first-class gallery-level showing. Aside from photographs utilized to amplify the front pieces and the foreword and introduction, all the photographs are arranged in alphabetical order by the last names of the artists. Hence, the stunning black-and-white paired images captured by Mark Jenkins follow the full-color images of plates 48 and 49 by Kobi Israel. In addition to noting on each page the name of the artist and his particular work, the final page is a “Directory of Artists” that provides plate numbers of the photographs in chronological order plus web sites that represent the artists. Ten end pages are devoted to thumbnail biographical profiles of the photographer-artist-models. Many photographers of the gay pantheon are among the contributors. The names of photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Tom Bianchi, David Hockney, Pierre et Gilles, and Andy Warhol who are often associated with homoerotic photographs are found in these pages, but so are the works and biographical profiles of straight men. One notable example is Kim Weston whose father Cole and grandfather Edward Weston are among the greatest photographers ever to work in America. His own “sly” self-portrait is an small image of himself as a voyeur as he peers through a window pane admiring the breath-taking form of a beautiful woman stepping nude into her bathing tub. In all, 89 photographers contributed more than 100 images to the project.

Many of the images are breathtaking in their image of male beauty. Standout photographers include John Dugdale, Anthony Cimino, John Arsenault, David Bartolomi, Robert Cusido, Anthony Goicolea, Drew Wojcik, Adam Raphael and Gerald Mocarsky. Many of the images, especially those portraits of the photographer with a sexual partner are unquestionably homoerotic. These include images by Tom Bianchi, Aaron Cobbett, Erwin Olaf, and Roberto Rincon. Any student of gay art in the most recent decades expects to be shocked by the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and both fans and students of his art will not be disappointed. Equally sensational, and probably more controversial are the photographs of Sean McDevitt, David Naz, Yasumasa Morimura, Pierre Molinier, Ralph Modica, and Richard Vechi. So controversial and so close to pornography and sadomasochism do some of these later photographers converge, that it is this reviewer’s recommendation that prospective purchasers attempt to peruse an actual copy of the book prior to ordering it through an online book service such as Amazon.com.

In an earlier review, this critic recommended that Jonathan Weinberg’s Male Desire be placed on coffee tables in gay homes and left there when straight friends and relatives visited as positive demonstration and testament that gay art is a legitimate and important art form AND has been so for centuries. However, the same counsel may not be “safely” made for Self-Exposure unless the relative coming for dinner is “Auntie Mame.” There are heroic and beautiful male (and some female) nude images in Reed Massengill’s volume of nude photographers’ personal nude self-portraits, but there are also images that seem designed to offend even gay sensibilities. Lyle Ashton Harris’ “Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etc. #2” in which one nude black man kisses a sexual partner while simultaneously pointing a gun into the lover’s chest, or Richard Vechi’s lacerated nude body image with copious red blood and titled, “My Cuts – Your Scars” simply push the envelope too far for this observer. They are photographs that border on the edge of more than just bad taste. The inclusion of these and other edgy nude photographs cause this reviewer to pass on Self-Exposure. Massengill has edited a stunning anthology based on a startling unique premise of artists photographing themselves in the nude. It is just unfortunate that the rough edges of too many images created are far too jagged.

—Jerry Flack
Denver, Colorado

Home • Newsletter Front Page • Newsletter Archives • Article Archives