(About photography/video and the male body, rather than about language.)
It started with a wonderful atmospheric photograph of a gorgeous nude man, sent to me by Mike McKinley, but without a source. The image is #1 in a posting I just did on AZBlogX; although it’s clearly a work of art (by a professional photographer using a professional model), it has a penis in it, so I can’t reproduce it here or on Facebook or Google+.
I gave the image the name “Romantic Haze” (since the model was posed in a blue-purple haze) while I searched for the source. This time Google Images eventually brought me to young Dutch filmmaker and photographer Paul Sixta and his model Marios.
From Sixta’s website, a brief bio:
Paul Sixta (Netherlands, 1979) graduated in 2003 from the Audio-Visual department at St. Joost Breda. Sixta works as a filmmaker and photographer. His films and video-installations were shown on festivals and museums worldwide and won several prizes. Sixta often collaborates with other artists and his work ranges from visual anthropology to performance videos. Sixta’s work deals with sensitive subjects, emphasizes the story telling, and delicately explores relationships.
There’s a generous sampling of his work on his website. There’s a wide range of stuff, including work on couples of all sorts, among them male couples. The studies of men are certainly homoerotic, but they are also character studies. My AZBlogX has three examples, of very different tones; in each, the model’s penis plays a role in the story you might tell about the man in the photo.
Sixta has done other nude studies of Marios, without showing his penis, so I can sample a few of these for you here. First, a shot of Marios’s face:
(#1)
Then a model who is probably Marios but might be another of Sixta’s bearded models (his body seems to be slenderer), pretty much in full, with his head tilted back, perhaps ecstatically:
(#2)
And then a remarkable pair of mirror-man studies:
(#3)
(#4)
Again, this might be Marios or it might be another of Sixta’s bearded models (he uses a number of them); the model seems to be substantially more muscular and hairier than the Marios in (#1) or in the AZBlogX photo — still, those eyes and that hair!. (Of course, some of these characteristics can be altered by shaving or grooming, and some by manipulating images digitally; note the moustache+beard differences between #3 and #4.)
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