Planet Homo

Gay Day in America

The Advocate wants a snapshot of gay America so they are asking that on this Friday, you take  a photo of your life on that single day, May 21—with your family or friends or on your own, at work or at play, on your adventures or experiencing a quiet moment of solace—anything from the mundane to the insane, from the glamorous to the gritty. The best photographs taken on that single day in the United States will be featured in a photo essay called “A Day in Gay America,” on Advocate.com and in the August 2010 issue of The Advocate. Images should be mailed no later than Friday, May 28 and should be of high resolution for print. For more information o the project visit:

HERE

The Moiré of Lust

 

The mantra of the web is: “one thing leads to another” and surely it does as an endless stream of thoughts and images deliver to the eye an unprecedented amount of information.

It is no secret that many of us spend time looking at what can only be called pornography. It is abundant, free and available at any hour in various dispositions: live cams for those who like to look and especially for those who like to be looked at, galleries upon galleries of images that suit any particular desire, fetish or lust, and of course, the so-called “dating” sites where people pretend to be interested in your personality when its really sex they are after.

Recently and without being to trace the footsteps, we fell upon a great site called homocomix, which is about gay characters living in a gay comic universe. Funny, occasionally sexy, always fresh, homocomix is visual relief to the oversaturated, over modeled (or painfully unrehearsed) world of gay imagery. Then, as one thing really does lead to another, homocomix lead us to Le Voyeur.

 A series of unrelated images bounce back in forth in time; Polaroid’s from the 60s, black white images from the 40s and 50s, with men doing what they do. There is a penchant for shower images and military photographs and tossed into the mix is the frequent celebrity image (Burt Lancaster nude!). The men on this site for the most part are very happy, they all seem to be enjoying their nudity without the usual pornographic grin of “check me out”. There is a kind of life caught between the moired images the past and the overdeveloped ambers of digital photography, without the polish and sheen of Photoshop, there is a truth about these photographs. It is almost archival in its review of homoerotic imagery: a series of black and white military images from the 40s catalog men in jockstraps in Muybridge fashion, though not particularly erotic, they demand you ask the question “why do these images exist?” There are many images of men in spandex, wrestlers, swimmers and the like, showing hints of their manhood in the embossed traces of flesh against fabric. There is beauty, humor, sadness and much tenderness in the selections that for those of an age will be nostalgic and for others a revelation.

The Morning Ride

 

It's Raining Men and the Culture of Now

"Words are flying out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe"
John Lennon 

Cultural shifts are not seismic events, they happen in the slow churning of time, often without trumpets, publicity or comment. Watching a movie last night, one was reminded that there was a time when movies and situations did not have cell phones—plots that by today's standards seem ridiculous as you scream: use your cell phone! So much has changed in the last decade, especially in media where all the old concepts of editorial and advertising have vanished and NOT been replaced by a model that anyone can bank on. Websites and blogs have replaced newspapers, which might invite immediacy but not accuracy. Harvey Levin's TMZ was taking for a ride yesterday when a published photo of John F. Kennedy frolicking on a yacht was found to be a hoax. TMZ claimed to have consulted with "multiple experts," including a forensic photo expert and two unnamed JFK biographers, as it sought to confirm that the late president was once photographed surrounded by a quartet of naked women: turns out the "president" was a paid model. Our own experience earlier this year when a rumor about the masthead of The Advocate turned out to be incorrect, but when the suggestion was given to Queerty, they published the rumor as fact, along with what they called verified sources. This kind of "journalism" invites fraud because it will most likely succeed as everyone rushes to fill the news vacuum or the blog entry, to appear current. What the public loses, ultimately is the confidence that the reporting of news is fact—facts on the Internet tend to dress and dance like opinions. But we might not really care.
The other dazzling aspect of the Internet is the amount of visual information supplied on a daily basis. We live on an image-rich diet of porn, erotica, retail and most certainly news, feed daily from the variable and endless fountains of imagery. The problem with glut is that distinction becomes vague, everything blends in a Gaussian blur of imagery, leaving few remarkable impressions. The one real question that begs to be answered is: who are all these men and who gets to photograph them? Photographers like Tom Bianchi must be pissed off at the digital revolution because it has revealed the simplicity of photographing beautiful naked men, and now, more than ever, everyone gets to play photographer. Only a handful get to model. And the startling fact is that much of it is quite good. As with so many once lucrative business models, porn must certainly be suffering from the proliferation of free naked imagery—why pay for something that is readily available, if it only requires a search engine? We have lost the art of shyness in the process: apparently every and anyone will pose for their digital moment and in what must be the image of the decade, a naked men holding his cell phone in a mirror, photographing themselves, the self-portrait takes on new meaning.
There is no stopping or going back. There will not be a return to Tri-X or modesty. We march forward into this increasingly complex and scary world, taking joy where we can find, sorrow when we must and the news, all the time.

For no reason at all

 
Check out this excellent photographers work.

Herbert List

Tom Ford clearly has seen the work of photographer Herbert List. In A Single Man, there is scene between two men shot in black and white that pays homage to Herbert List.
Part Jewish and all gay, Herbert List fled his family's Hamburg coffee brokerage business in 1936 and traveled through free Europe taking many of his best known photographs. He was in Greece shooting pictures like this front and this back when Germany invaded the country in 1941. List was forced to return home and later had to join the German army. He spent 1944-45 in Norway making military maps. After the war he joined Magnum but for whatever reason he didn't take many photos. He published three major books of earlier work and eventually gave up photography altogether to concentrate on his drawings, which are currently on view at the gay museum in Berlin. I saw them last month and was charmed by his light touch, bright colors, and happy nude gay couples. In 1988, Stephen Spender finally published his novel The Temple, a roman a clef of his pre-War years in Germany which includes a character based on List, Joachim. Herbert List died in 1975 but his style lives on in the work of Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, among others. The above photograph was shot in 1936.

Notes on a commercial

Grainy to a fault, this commercial is currently being shown in theaters across America. At first view is it is difficult to grasp the significance of "Go Forth" a commercial directed by Cary Fukunaga for Wieden+Kennedy, Portland using a poem by Walt Whitman and photographed by Ryan McGinley. The opening image appears to be a sunken, flickering America in either pre-dawn or post nuclear attack. Ryan McGinley goes the way of O. Winston Link, using stark black and white images pitched against a grainy recording of Walt Whitman reciting his poem. The cumulative effect is one of one of despair as children watch the fourth of July in black and white. We can applaud the efforts to be bring something different to the advertising table, but this commercial is nothing less than spooky. In a moment where, for the first time in reality, there is uncertainty about the future, this commercial only reinforces doubt.

Happy Valentine's

Yes it is.

http://www.obviousmag.com/

Photo Found

 "Vinny, an Unloader" (1982).  South Street Seaport Museum
2008.005.0018. Copyright Barbara G. Mensch.

Are you a B Boy?

How the Economy Works

 

Odd things found around my house make for odd props.