Wolfgang Tillmans: Intimacy as Practice
Wolfgang Tillmans does not make his images look like art. This is the most deliberate thing about them. A Tillmans photograph might be a man's torso...
Bruce Weber: The Homoerotic Ideal and Its Reckoning
There is a Bruce Weber photograph from 1982 — shot for Calvin Klein, which means it appeared on billboards, in magazines, on the sides of buses — of a...
Rotimi Fani-Kayode: The Body as Sacred Ground
Rotimi Fani-Kayode photographed the Black gay male body at a moment — London in the 1980s — when no one else was doing it with anything approaching hi...
Tom of Finland: The Body as Fantasy and Politics
Touko Laaksonen drew men who did not exist in 1950s Finland. He drew them into existence anyway. This is the essential biographical fact about the ar...
Ryan McGinley: Bodies in Motion
Ryan McGinley's photographs look like the feeling of being twenty-two and briefly, completely certain that everything is going to be fine. The bodies...
Jack Pierson: Desire and Elegy
Jack Pierson makes photographs that feel like something you remember rather than something you saw. The light is a little overexposed. The composition...
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Man Who Made the Art World Look
There is a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe of a man named Thomas in a three-piece suit. The suit is impeccably cut. Thomas is seated, composed, his...
Helmut Newton: Desire as Architecture
Helmut Newton did not photograph the male body often. He is known, overwhelmingly, for his images of women — powerful, dangerous, frequently naked, al...
Pierre et Gilles: The Sacred and the Erotic
A Pierre et Gilles image arrives fully formed and demands nothing of you except that you look. The colours are impossible — saturated past anything th...
Herb Ritts: The Classical Gaze
Herb Ritts photographed the male body the way other people photograph mountains — as something vast, elemental, shaped by forces larger than any indiv...