Elska: The Living Heir

The Concept

The concept is simple enough to state in a sentence: each issue of Elska is devoted to a single city and the ordinary gay, bisexual, and queer men who live there. Campbell travels to the city, puts out an open call for participants, photographs everyone who shows up — outdoors in the city's streets, then indoors at home with less or no clothes — and publishes their images alongside personal essays written by the subjects themselves.

The simplicity is deceptive. What sounds like a formula produces, issue after issue, a quality of intimacy and diversity and genuine photographic attention that makes Elska unlike any other publication in the gay tradition. Several qualities are responsible.

The first is Campbell's open casting policy. Unlike every other publication in this tradition, Elska does not select based on conventional attractiveness. Campbell photographs everyone who responds to the open call, and the resulting images represent the actual range of gay male bodies — every age from young adult to elderly, every body type from very slim to very large, every ethnic background, every level of conventional handsomeness — in a way that no curated publication, however well-intentioned, can match. The Advocate described Elska as "probably the nicest, most sincere magazine to have ever been created." The British Journal of Photography called it "part intellectual queer pin-up mag and part sexy anthropology journal." Both descriptions are accurate.

The second quality is the city concept itself. Each issue is a portrait not just of individual men but of a place — the specific way a city shapes its gay residents, the particular quality of gay life in Bogotá or Dhaka or Salt Lake City or Istanbul. Elska has published in cities across every inhabited continent, including places where gay life is legally precarious and visibility is a genuinely courageous act. The Dhaka issue, the Istanbul issue — these are documents of queer existence in places where the publication's open declaration of its subject is itself a political statement.

The Photography

Campbell trained in fashion photography before founding Elska, and his discomfort with the fashion industry's treatment of models — the rejection, the idealisation, the reduction of people to surfaces — was partly what drove him to create a different kind of publication. The Elska photographs are his direct response to everything he found wrong about fashion photography: they treat their subjects as people rather than as bodies, as specific individuals with specific lives rather than as interchangeable holders of attractive physical attributes.

The photographic style is deliberately casual — natural light, the subject's own home, clothes and settings that belong to the person rather than to a stylist's brief. The outdoor city shots are documentary: the subject walking in their own neighbourhood, doing the things they actually do. The indoor nude shots are intimate without being pornographic — genuinely erotic in the sense that the body is present and its desirability is acknowledged, but made in the register of the private and the personal rather than the staged and the commercial.

The quality of this photography is not accidental. Campbell is a skilled photographer with a genuine eye, and the casualness of the Elska aesthetic — the naturalness, the intimacy — is as carefully constructed as any more formally ambitious photography. The images reward the sustained look that the magazine's format, the bookazine object you read in proper time rather than scroll past, is designed to encourage.

The Writing

Elska's written content is as distinctive as its photography. The personal essays — written by the men photographed, in their own words, without editorial mediation beyond translation when required — are documents of individual gay experience in the cities where they live. They cover coming out and relationships, work and family, the specific textures of gay life in places that mainstream gay media rarely covers.

These essays are not always elegant prose. They are not supposed to be. They are voices — the actual voices of men in Tbilisi and Manila and São Paulo speaking about their lives — and the value of that authenticity is greater than any editorial polish could provide.

The Living Tradition

Elska is the proof that the tradition of gay print publishing — the serious magazine, combining honest photography with intelligent content, built for the gay man who wants to see himself and his world accurately represented — is still alive and still capable of producing work of genuine significance.

It also demonstrates what that tradition looks like when its worst habits — the narrow beauty ideal, the commercial compromise, the editorial anxiety about what mainstream culture will accept — are removed. Without those habits, the tradition produces something closer to what it always aspired to: a publication that sees gay men honestly, photographs them beautifully, and trusts the reader to find in ordinary life the same quality of attention that more glamorous subjects attract.

BoysDo is the digital platform for the same viewer that *Elska* is the print magazine for — the gay man who wants the honest image, made with genuine care, of bodies and desires that deserve more than the filtered and the curated and the commercially managed. *Elska* goes city by city. BoysDo builds an archive. Both are adding to the same tradition.

Subscribe to Elska at [elskamagazine.com](https://www.elskamagazine.com).