Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

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Julio Torres

August 11, 2024

In  my e-mail recently, the program for this year’s New Yorker Festival, with some of the interviewees in a display ad:


(#1) No, I don’t know why pink; Cumming, Maddow, and Torres are notably LGBT, but not the other five in this display (maybe 3 out of 8 exceeds some tipping point, but it’s more likely that pink’s just a random color choice, devoid of meaning)

Now, which of these 8 is not like the others? Well, that’s an odd photo of singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, but it’s an atypical one. Otherwise, Julio Torres’s photo does stand, or leap, out, and for him it’s fairly restrained; his pictures show him with a wide variety of hair colors (sometimes involving henna red or bright blue) and bodily adornments, and sometimes in drag. Meanwhile, he’s young, adorable, outrageous, smart, and dead series about creating comedy in a variety of forms.

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Posted in Color, Events, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv, People, Performance, Photography, Spanish, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Four models and a film-maker

August 3, 2024

It begins with an arresting photo on Pinterest yesterday showing two beautiful young men in each other’s arms:


(#1) From the Fashionably Male website, “STOP & STARE Alexan Sarikamichian New Work: Agus & Adriel” on 9/26/17 — a fashion spread by the film-maker AS featuring two beautiful young models, Agustin Bruni and Adriel Pino, presented as in a bromance in which the young men “experiment with new feelings about sex, brotherhood, camaraderie”

AS is then the thread leading to the third male model, Severiano Astrada, a hunky young man projecting a tough-guy exterior as the main character in AS’s short film Severiano (2018); and to the fourth, Roman Stubrin, sometimes playful, but mostly offering an unsettling gimlet stare, intense and riveting — in an AS / Benjamin Baccetti film project (in progress) focused on him, and in an extraordinary 2024 fashion piece about him on the Spanish fashion site Fucking Young!

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Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Photography, Shirtlessness, Spanish, Underwear | 1 Comment »

The feminine gaze on brute masculine power

August 2, 2024

Encountered on Pinterest this morning, the photographer and film-maker Jem Goulding. A characteristic photo:


(#1) A powerful male body, photographed as if in a chance snapshot of everyday life (with an inscrutable backstory)

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Lexical semantics, Masculinity, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Cruising Utopia

July 14, 2024

(Men’s bodies and men portrayed in sexual acts, so not to evereyone’s taste)

Encountered on Pinterest this morning, on the Pace Gallery online exhibitions site, “Peter Hujar: Cruising Utopia” (open from 6/30 to 8/3 in 2020), with this arresting photograph:


(#1) Jay and Fernando [Two Men in Leather Kissing], ca. 1966 (I’m an avowed fan of men kissing men, so this photo was guaranteed to get my rapt attention)

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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography | 2 Comments »

The gay scallop shell

July 6, 2024

(Moves quickly into the male body and man-on-man sex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

Terrible days in the heat, barely functioning, while I accumulate promises to write on various topics, praise scholars of note, and follow up on earlier postings. So I’m feeling singularly inadequate — have in fact reached the point of taking a posting, any posting, off the gigantic heap of things in preparation, just to get something, anything, done. (Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be cheered that the day is predicted to be “much cooler” than yesterday — a high of merely 86F instead of 98F. That would still leave me breathless, profoundly exhausted, and unable to think clearly. I did go out at 6:30 am to water the plants in the cool of the morning, to protect them from heat death, and that actually was pleasant. Now I’m just avoiding going outdoors.

In any case, this is bringing you a follow-up to my 5/11/24 posting “The gay handshake”, which was about the trope of the blowjob as gay handshake. Today it’s the penis as gay scallop shell, on (images of) cocks as a gay equivalent of (images of) scallop shells — penises as a design motif in decor. Dicks treated like not only scallop shells, but also thistles, dolphins, pineapples, roses, tigers, bumble bees, lilies, elephants, and peacock feathers (and many other things) as figurative motifs. Alongside more abstract motifs, like the fleur-de-lis, Greek key, quatrefoil, genital triad, Chinese knot, chevron, star, and paisley motifs. And color motifs, like the Princeton orange and black, the Ohio State scarlet and gray, and the gay rainbow flag colors.

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Posted in Design, Furnishings and tools, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, My life, Photography | 1 Comment »

The exile

July 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month of July (and recognize, with a flourish of maple leaves, Canada Day), with American Independence Day about to be upon us — plenty of local fireworks on Saturday night, more to come; and it’s time to contemplate my annual celebratory (kosher) hot dog

Meanwhile, Hana Filip posted, on Facebook yesterday , this enigmatic photo —  Napoli 1979, by Josef Koudelka — without explanation or other comment:


(#1) A young woman sunbathing, face down, on a Naples seawall while reading from a book

Which I turned into an exploration of Koudelka’s life and work. My response:

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Posted in Art, History, Holidays, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Casey Spooner

June 9, 2024

… the hunky way-gay electroclash musician and performance artist, who somehow escaped notice on this blog until a photo from a 2017 Out magazine piece (“Gallery: Wet n Wild With Casey Spooner”) about him popped up on my Pinterest yesterday, with this, um, hose-drinking shot:


(#1) There are contexts in which this would be innocent fun — but this is not one of them

The rest of this posting will be soaked through with playful, entertaining queerness, from a performer who deploys his very muscular high masculinity to jab at and undermine conventional notions of gender, sexuality, identity, and relationships. That might not be to your taste; use your judgment,

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Music, Photography, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Design for sales

May 29, 2024

(Portraits of men in lust — ads for gay porn that focuses on raw man-on-man sex — discussed in plain language, so entirely unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Suppose you’ve been asked to work with a crew of gay porn staff — including a director, photographer, and a pair of actors who will couple in the company’s latest porn video — on designing a p.r. still that advertises that video (these ads are almost all carefully posed, rather than captured from live action on-screen). What are your design specs for the spot (understanding that not all of the specs can be satisfied at once)? What do you want it to be like?

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Posted in Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography | Leave a Comment »

More Kix on Route 66

May 21, 2024

Passed along by two friends on Facebook recently, this Manchild Manor cartoon, deploying Kix breakfast cereal in a pun on the title (of the theme song for a tv show) “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”:


(#1) If you don’t know the song, this cartoon is incomprehensible

(I don’t know where or when this cartoon first appeared, and I couldn’t find it on the (sizable) Instagram page for the strip; I’ve appealed to the cartoonist, but in my experience, most artists view such queries as just a nuisance drag on their time, so they’re not inclined to reply. If he gets back to me, I’ll add his information to this posting.)

[Added on 5/22. Never assume. The cartoonist — Tim Thavirat, now living in San Diego CA after some time in Austin TX — has now replied, and even thanked me for sharing his work on my blog. This cartoon is from 10/25/18, early in the days of his cartoon page — a silly pun that tickled his fancy.]

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Posted in Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Photography, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

“A place for us to see each other”

May 12, 2024

(Some photos of male bodies and allusions to sex between men, but no naughty bits and no street language — just not to everyone’s taste)

The end tag to a New York Times story, “At Frieze, Photographer of Gay Life Seeks ‘a Place in the Sunshine’: Stanley Stellar has documented gay New York, on the streets and in his studio, for decades. Now he steps onto his biggest stage”, by Erik Piepenburg, on-line on the NYT website on 5/3 (in print on 5/4); from the story:

From May 1-5 [AZ: yes, the event is now over; my life has been difficult, and I’m doing the best that I can], Stellar will step onto possibly his biggest stage when Kapp Kapp, the queer-centered TriBeCa gallery run by the twin brothers Sam and Daniel Kapp, shows his work at Frieze New York, the annual international art fair that returns to the Shed at Hudson Yards.

On view will be 15 of Stellar’s “Piers” photographs: assertive portraits and lazy-day snapshots of the mostly gay men who claimed the decrepit West Side piers as social and sexual turf in the 1970s and ’80s. Many photographs will be shown in color for the first time; “Stanley Stellar: The Piers,” a related book of photos, has been reprinted timed to the fair.


(#1) “Piers Roof July 1, 1978”

(more…)

Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography | 2 Comments »

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