Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Not about language, but about intimacy between men and about male photography.)

A while back, I posted here on men kissing men, with a stunning photograph by David Vance and a few notes on the power of such images. Then a couple days ago I posted six images of male intimacy on my X blog, including two more of men kissing men.

And I remembered the book Kissed: Sensuality in Gay Art (ed. by Stephan Niederweiser, Bruno Gmünder, 2010) — gay here means ‘gay male’ — 260 pages of images from over 40 photographers showing male-male kisses of all sorts, from sweet to sensual to urgently passionate to aggressive.

The cover photo:

This is by Fred Goudon, from his book Sunday Morning (2007). I am a fan of Goudon’s, and have written on my X blog about his work in connection with the strategy in some male photography (by Jack Pierson, for example) to conceal penises (though often just barely), thereby drawing attention to them, and the strategy of other photographers (Goudon, in particular) to hold back views of the penis for some time and then to use these images sparingly, making them more powerful when they appear; see here on his book Virility, and here on his fifth book, Cinq , where I said:

Like Jack Pierson’s Every Single One of Them, Cinq resolutely conceals the models’ penises (sometimes with a covering hand, as in the cover photo, sometimes in underwear, and so on) and focuses more on faces than anything else. Unlike the Pierson book, Cinq is thoroughly erotic in tone, focused on beautiful, sensuously presented, young men (as are Goudon’s four other books).

Sunday Morning has many solo shots, but also many male couples, men being companionable, affectionate, and playful. And there are penises — not a great many of them — presented matter-of-factly.

This entry was posted on May 3, 2011 at 10:28 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Not about language, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.