*The Big Penis Book* by Dian Hanson: A Review

Who Is Dian Hanson?

Understanding The Big Penis Book requires understanding its editor, because Hanson's sensibility — intelligent, direct, historically grounded, entirely without prudishness — is present on every page. She is not simply a compiler. She is an editor in the full sense: someone who brings a coherent intellectual and aesthetic vision to the material she assembles.

Hanson was born in Seattle in 1951 and spent the first twenty-five years of her publishing career in the sex magazine industry, editing titles including Juggs, Leg Show, Outlaw Biker, and Oui. She was not slumming. She was, by her own account, doing exactly what she wanted to do, in an industry she found genuinely interesting, for audiences she respected. When Benedikt Taschen — the founder of the Cologne-based art book publisher that bears his name — pursued her for years to join his company, she initially refused: "I want to keep doing what I'm doing. I love pornography."

She eventually agreed, in 2001, to take over Taschen's Sexy Books division, and the work she has produced there — over fifty titles, covering the full range of erotic visual culture from pin-up to fetish to the historical nude — has been among the most important publishing in the field. The move from sex magazines to Taschen was not a transition from low culture to high. It was a change of format in service of a continuous intellectual project: the serious documentation of human erotic visual culture.

The Big Penis Book is one of the most explicit expressions of that project, and one of the most revealing of Hanson's sensibility. She is a straight woman who has spent her career fascinated by male sexuality in all its forms. Her relationship to the material — curious, appreciative, knowledgeable, warm — gives the book an editorial voice that is genuinely unusual in publications of this kind.

What the Book Is

The Big Penis Book is a large-format hardcover — 12 by 12 inches, 384 pages, substantial enough to require two hands — published in a trilingual edition (English, French, German) and illustrated with over 400 photographs. The majority of the images are from the 1970s, when the sexual revolution first created the conditions under which photographers could document the male body in full nudity for commercial distribution. But the book also includes historical early photographs and traces the subject from its nineteenth-century origins through to the contemporary period.

The book is structured around photographers and studios rather than around the bodies themselves, and this editorial decision is what lifts it from novelty to history. Each section profiles a photographer or studio — their background, their methods, their relationship to their models and to the commercial context in which they worked — through interviews conducted by Hanson and critical essays. The subjects are asked serious questions and given space to answer seriously, and the resulting profiles constitute a genuine oral history of a corner of photographic practice that has rarely been treated with this quality of attention.

The photographers and studios represented include Bob Mizer of the Athletic Model Guild, whose mid-century physique photography is now recognised as a foundational document of gay male visual culture; David Hurles of Old Reliable, known for a rawer, more confrontational aesthetic; Colt Studio, which brought bodybuilder masculinity to homoerotic photography with a technical quality that influenced a generation of successors; Falcon Studios, whose founder Chuck Holmes is profiled by Hanson; Champion Studios, Sierra Domino Studios, Third World and Zebra Studios, and others.

There is also a chapter on James Bidgood — the filmmaker and photographer whose extraordinary homoerotic fantasy images, made in his Manhattan apartment in the 1960s, remained largely unknown until their discovery decades later. Bidgood's work is among the most purely beautiful male erotic photography ever made, and his inclusion in the book is one of the most important editorial decisions Hanson makes.

The Photographers Who Matter

The book's most significant cultural contribution is its treatment of Bob Mizer and the Athletic Model Guild. Mizer founded the AMG in 1945 in Los Angeles and spent forty years photographing young men — initially under the cover of physique photography for bodybuilding magazines, then increasingly explicitly — building an archive of over one million images that constitutes one of the most extensive documents of mid-century American gay desire ever assembled.

Mizer's work has been the subject of growing critical attention in recent years, as the art world has begun to recognise the photographic quality and cultural significance of what he made. The Big Penis Book treats his work as it deserves: with serious attention, detailed historical context, and reproduction quality that allows the images to be appreciated as photographs rather than as historical curiosities.

Colt Studio, founded by Jim French in 1967, receives similar treatment. French's photographs — heavily muscled men, precisely lit, presented with a graphic formality that approaches the monumental — are among the most technically accomplished in the tradition of gay male photography, and Hanson's profile of French and his method is illuminating about both the man and the work.

The inclusion of Falcon Studios — and the profile of Chuck Holmes, which overlaps with the studio's history covered in BoysDo's own article on Falcon — is a reminder of how closely the histories of gay erotic photography and gay pornographic film are intertwined. The same studios, the same photographers, the same networks of talent and distribution shaped both.

The Writing

Hanson's introductory essay — "Size Matters" — sets the tone for the book and demonstrates why she is the right editor for this subject. She approaches the phallus as a cultural historian rather than as either a pornographer or an academic, tracing the centuries-old human fascination with the large penis through myth, art, and photography with a combination of learning and wit that is entirely her own voice.

The essay is also honest about what the book is, which not all editors of similar publications manage. Hanson knows she is making an object of desire as well as a work of history, and she does not pretend otherwise. The photographs in this book were made to be looked at with desire; the book presents them in a context that also rewards scholarly attention; and both kinds of looking are legitimate. This double validity is what makes Taschen's erotic publishing, at its best, genuinely different from both the academic and the pornographic alternatives.

The interview material is consistently excellent. Hanson clearly did serious editorial work on these conversations — drawing out the photographers' memories of specific shoots, their relationships with their models, the commercial and legal pressures under which they worked, the aesthetic choices they made and why. The result is a book that reads as well as it looks.

The Taschen Object

Part of what The Big Penis Book is cannot be separated from its physical form. Taschen produces objects of high material quality — good paper, good binding, precise colour reproduction — and the physical experience of the book matters to how it is encountered. This is a heavy thing, substantial in the hand, with images reproduced at a scale that allows genuine attention to photographic quality. It is designed to be owned, placed on a shelf or a table, returned to.

This physical quality connects the book to the tradition of photography publishing — the monograph, the collected works, the object that a photograph deserves when it is taken seriously as art. The photographs in The Big Penis Book are presented with the same material respect that a Taschen photography monograph gives to Helmut Newton or Herb Ritts. The subject is different; the editorial conviction — that the photographs deserve the best possible presentation — is the same.

What to Make of It

The Big Penis Book is exactly what it says it is, and it is considerably more than that. It is an archive of a specific photographic tradition — the commercial photography of the male body, in the decades when the male body first became a fully available photographic subject — assembled with genuine historical intelligence and presented with the material quality the subject deserves.

For gay men interested in the history of how their desires have been photographed and published, it is essential. For anyone interested in the history of erotic photography more broadly, it is a significant document. For the viewer who simply wants to spend time with over 400 images of the male body as photographed by practitioners who knew what they were doing, it is also exactly the right book.

The title tells you what it is. Dian Hanson's career tells you it will be done properly. Taschen tells you it will be beautiful. All three promises are kept.

BoysDo is a platform for the kind of sustained, attentive looking that a book like this rewards. The photographs in Hanson's collection deserve more than a glance. So do the ones on this platform.

Part of the BoysDo editorial series. Explore the platform at [boysdo.com](https://boysdo.com).