Photography is a technology that facilitates documentation of the visible world by manipulating light with a mechanical device. It is also a subjective medium capable of challenging stereotypical constructions of masculinity in art and culture, given the power through the relationships established between the photographer and the photographed subject.
Influenced by idealisations of the GrecoRoman male form dominant in Western art of the nineteenth century, early photographers of the male body also wished to represent its perfectibility, beauty and poise. During the late nineteenth century, interest in the photographed male body grew extensively because of the perceived links between men’s physical fitness and disciplined behaviour and national well-being. The photography of Koch and Rieth, particularly their Der Akt (The Nude) series of 1894–5, resurrected the importance of Gymnastik, the Classical art of physical training. By depicting the male nude interacting with, even serving as, architectural structures, Koch and Rieth photographically fashioned masculinity as a literal cornerstone of German society. In Britain during the 1890s, interest in the well-proportioned muscular male body culminated in the frequent photographing of the bodybuilder Sandow by artists such as Steckel. Circulation of these photographs produced a cult following of the hypermuscular male body, known as ‘Sandowism’, and illustrated what the Sandow Society called a’crying need for a fitter race’. Photographs of Sandow anticipated the popularity of nude male photography in the 1950s and 1960s, a genre known as ‘Beefcake’ (Leddick 2005).
In Germany, other photographers such as von Gloeden relied upon Classical and Orientalist motifs in the imaging of nude male youths; nevertheless, his work, especially Two Young Men with Gredan Urns (c. 1890s), illustrated a different idealisation of the male body as younger, more feminine and subject to homoerotic desires. Because of the homoerotic overtones present in von Gloeden’s oeuvre, Mussolini’s Fascist police destroyed much of his work, illustrating the photograph’s potent ability to subvert social and political norms imposed on the male body and its representation.
Interest in photography as a documentation of the healthy virile male body continued into the 1920s and 1930s, in the Naturist Movement. During this period in Germany, photographs of males exercising and engaged in outdoor activities served as an increasingly agitprop art form, reflecting Aryanism as a corporeal and social ideal. Photographic tableaux by Riebicke and Holmes Nicholls represented masculinity as perfectible through physical exertion, a process aestheticised by its situation within idyllic landscapes.
In the United States, wartime photography of the 1940s illustrated that the male body, joined with themes of violence and valour, could also propagandise and mythologise history, as well as complicate photography’s usual association with ‘truth’. Rosenthal’s The Raising of the Plag on Iwo Jima (1945) seemingly depicted six men asserting victory following intense battle on the Pacific island. Yet, considering that the island was not completely secured until a month following the photograph’s publication, the image served as a staged spectacle of heroic masculinity that performed as a patriotic icon. Just as Rosenthal’s photograph immortalised the male-as-hero, Franklin’s photograph of firemen raising the United States flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 similarly became symbolic of the nation’s resilience following the terrorist attacks. The firemen’s stances in Franklin’s photograph, as well as the overall composition of the photograph, maintain an uncanny resemblance to Rosenthal’s image.
In contrast to photography’s tendency in the early to mid-twentieth century to illustrate an idealised masculinity, more recent photography has explored the contentiousness, complexity and instability of masculinity as a visual paradigm. In his work Portrait (Twin) (1988), Morimura plays the roles taken in the famous Impressionist painting by both Manet’s nude white Olympia and her African maidservant. In so doing, Morimura demonstrates that clear representations of masculinity can be problematised by gender, sexuality, class and race. For Morimura, photography serves as an act of translation in which familiar images from art history can be unsettled and questioned using the artist’s shifting understandings of his masculine identity. Other artists, notably Mapplethorpe, believed that viewing the male body had become regimented and routine. Rather than using photography to establish a standardised vision of masculinity, Mapplethorpe’s photographs openly showcased masculinity as a function of the body’s uncensored desires. In so doing, Mapplethorpe forced viewers to confront stereotypes such as racism and homophobia that have frequently governed visualisations of the male body. One of Mapplethorpe’s most famous works, Self Portrait (1978), depicts the artist’s leather-clad body with a bullwhip inserted in his anus. Resistant to portraiture conventions, the work unabashedly displays the artist’s self-determinations of masculine identity and sexual desire. Such forthright renderings of the male body would not only fuel the ‘Culture Wars’ of the 1990s, but would also prompt other artists, such as Wojnarowicz, Hujar and Serrano, to use photography as a means of addressing the myriad social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary masculinity.
References and further reading
Bright, D. (ed.) (1998) The Passionate Camera, London and New York: Routledge.
Davis, M.D. (1991) The Male Nude in Contemporary Photography, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Ellenzweig, A. (1992) The Homoerotic Photograph, New York: Columbia University Press.
Ewing, W.A. (1994) The Body, San Francisco, CA: Chronicle.
Goldstein, L. (ed.) (1995) The Male Body, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Leddick, D.W. (2005) The Male Nude, New York: Taschen.
Lehman, P. (1993) Running Scared, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Meyer, R. (1993) ‘Robert Mapplethorpe and the discipline of photography’, in H. Abelove, M.A.Barale and D.M.Halperin (eds) The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 360–80.
Stern, W. (1996) ‘Aestheticising masculinity’, Thresholds, 9:40–4.
Vettel-Becker, P. (2005) Shootingfrom the Hip, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Weiermair, P. (ed.) (1987) The Hidden Image, Cambridge: MIT Press.
