As A Hard Man is Good to Find! opens at The Photographers’ Gallery, curator Alistair O’Neill talks about the covert visual culture of making and sharing erotic images among gay men from the 1930s until the 1990s
, featuring anonymous pictures of the Portobello Boys from the 50s, a portrait of Monotosh Roy, the first Asian man to win Mr Universe , and street portraits made around Euston in the 80s. While sourced from across the UK, London is very much the nucleus, with key areas for men seeking men to photograph mapped across the boroughs.observes O’Neill.
it’s an important part of how queer culture manifests, in large cities as opposed to more remote, smaller areas.” “The project is trying to develop a framework for looking at this kind of imagery that doesn’t position artists on one side of the room and physique photographers on the other,” he continues, alluding to traditional artistic groupings. “It’s putting them all together, so different characters rub up against each other in ways that you might not have expected.” Despite echoing a quote attributed to Mae West, the show’s title was actually lifted from a catalogue sheet list of photographer John S Barrington. “I just thought it was funny; it’s provocative, risqué.
I was also trying to galvanise this idea that physique photography represents this ideal of masculinity – that is a hard body,” notes the curator.and Archivespresents a marker of specific visual trends in gay spaces. “By the end of the 20th century, physique photography was replaced by pornography, so it’s about that, but also the legacy of Aids and how it decimated those communities,”is not well known at all – there are compendiums of– but this deserves the time and space.
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