How Photographers Have Challenged What Masculinity Looks Like - Artsy

3/9/2020 How Photographers Have Challenged What Masculinity Looks Like - Artsy
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Visual Culture
How Photographers Have Challenged What

Masculinity Looks Like
Charlotte Jansen Mar 2, 2020 4:55pm
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-photographers-challenged-masculinity 1/17
Adi Nes, Untitled, from the series “Soldiers,” 1999. Courtesy of the artist and Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los
Angeles.
In London, a radical reimagining of how we experience contemporary

masculinity in visual culture is on show at the Barbican. e extensive
new exhibition, “Masculinities: Liberation rough Photography,”

ranges from photographs of the Taliban and Nazi soldiers to
3/9/2020 g p g p How Photographers Have Challenged What Masculinity Looks Like - Artsy
Searchmanspreading, incontinence,
by artist, gallery, style, theme, tag, etc. and sagging scrota. But in a world where
men already dominate, do we really need to see more of them?
“Men and masculinity nd themselves under the microscope as never

before—but it’s not entirely clear what masculinity means,” said the
Barbican’s Alona Pardo, who curated “Masculinities.”
Rineke Dijkstra Forte da Casa, Portugal, May

20 (A), 2000
Marian Goodman Gallery
Catherine Opie, Rusty, 2008. © Catherine Opie,
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Thomas
Dane Gallery, London. Courtesy of Barbican Art
Gallery.
e show, which runs through May 17th, takes what Pardo calls a
“murky premise” as a starting point to examine the works of 56 artists,
created between 1960 and today, that respond to traditional notions of
what makes a man. In the past six decades, Pardo pointed out, “artists
have consistently sought to disrupt and disturb narrow de nitions of
gender that determine social structures.” ese artworks exist as a form

of resistance, operating in societies where traditional conceptions of
masculinity persist.
“It’s important to say this exhibition is, in part, a celebration of

masculinity—patriarchy and the abuse of male power is not
synonymous with masculinity,” said Jane Alison, head of visual arts at
the Barbican. As the title of the show suggests, the problem is not
masculinity in and of itself, but how it has been constructed as a
singular ideal—something that, Alison and Pardo believe, photography
has the potential to free us from.
Richard Mosse Fraternity, 2008

Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College
In one of the exhibition’s six sections, “Disrupting the Archetype,”

artists deconstruct entrenched images of heteronormative and
hegemonic masculinity. ere’s a series of four color photographs of
Portuguese forcado bull ghters who must work together to overpower

the animal. ese portraits, however, by Rineke Dijkstra, show the men
alone and bloodied; captured not in the midst of their ght but after
the act, they appear torn, raw, and exhausted. Stereotypically masculine
qualities—strength, bravery, domination, violence—are acknowledged
and unraveled, too. Sam Contis’s 2017 series “Deep Springs” examines
the mythology of the cowboy and the American West. e images are
the result of four years that Contis spent deeply involved in an all-male
liberal arts college in California.
Contis’s work connects to other photographs in the exhibition that

highlight the spaces and places where women are excluded—and where
masculinity can become toxic. Frat houses feature in Richard Mosse’s
2007 video work Fraternity ( lmed inside Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon)
and in Andrew Moisey’s 2018 photobook e American Fraternity.
Karlheinz Weinberger, Horseshoe Buckle, 1962. Karen Knorr, Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no
© Karlheinz Weinberger. Courtesy of Esther longer boiled So far have Standards fallen from the series
Woerdeho . Gentlemen, 1981-83. © Karen Knorr. Courtesy of Tate and
Barbican Art Gallery.
e U.K. capital’s infamous private boys’ clubs—which have produced

many of the U.K.’s politicians—are depicted in 26 photographs by
Karen Knorr. She shot the images in central London in the early 1980s
at members only men only spaces and captioned them with snippets
at members-only, men-only spaces, and captioned them with snippets
Searchof
byoverheard
artist, gallery, conversations,
style, theme, tag, etc.
news reports, and government records.
With their leather chester elds and dark wood paneling—design
elements that are common in other exclusive, male-dominated
environments across Britain like private schools, Oxford University, and
the Houses of Parliament—Knorr establishes an intriguing link between
these hypermasculine environments, their architecture, and power.
Knorr’s work contrasts with the domestic and interior “safe” spaces in
the works of artists like Sunil Gupta, who has documented the
LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. and India for three decades. Gupta’s
series “Exiles” (1986–87) portrays gay and queer men living in New
Delhi in the 1980s, at a time when homosexuality was prohibited. e
construction of their own world—and Gupta’s—through the camera
was the only way to preserve their identities and express themselves, or
“to revel in their queerness as a natural state of being,” Pardo said.
Gupta, who lives in London, will have his rst retrospective at e
Photographer’s Gallery in fall 2020.
Sunil Gupta, Untitled 22, from the series “Christopher Street,” 1976. © Sunil Gupta. Courtesy of the artist and
Hales Gallery.
roughout the exhibition, it is mostly up to queer artists to “shatter

oppressive sexual stereotypes,” as Pardo put it, and to problematize and
challenge masculinity and constructs of maleness. Many of the artists in
this exhibition make work about the LGBTQ+ communities they
belong to, their own experiences as queer people, and the versions of
masculinity they perceive. Catherine Opie’s series “Being and Having”
(1991) is a theater of typecasts that views machismo from the
3/9/2020
(1991) is a theater of typecasts that views machismo from the
How Photographers Have Challenged What Masculinity Looks Like - Artsy
Searchperspective ofstyle,
by artist, gallery, butchness.
theme, tag,ere
etc. are exquisite, erotically charged portraits
by the late Peter Hujar, while trans artist Cassils gives us a vision of
masculinity without men in their “Time Lapse” (2011), a Muybridge-
esque presentation of their body as it transformed under steroids and

training.
While the queer gaze is posited here as fundamental to the reinvention

of masculinities, there are also artists who present counter-narratives
from other perspectives—particularly in a revelatory section dedicated
to the paternal gure. ere are highly emotive, tender portraits of a
family history in Kalen Na’il Roach’s series “My Dad Without
Everybody Else” (2013–14), which shows old photographs of the artist’s
father as a baby, a child, and a youth—a reconstruction through the
materiality of the photograph. In Masahisa Fukase’s equally tender
representations of his father, from “Memories of Father” (1971–87), the
artist charts his father’s aging and failing health. In one poignant
picture, the son carries the father in his arms, their backs turned away
from the camera. Evocative and deeply personal, these works pull you
between absence and presence, introducing a profound sense of fragility
and vulnerability not normally associated with the image of the
Searchauthoritarian father
by artist, gallery, style, gure.
theme, tag, etc.
Masahisa Fukase, Upper row, from le to right: A, a Hal Fischer, Street Fashion: Jock, from the series “Gay
model; Toshiteru, Sukezo, Masahisa. Middle row, Semiotics,” 1977/2016. Courtesy of the artist and
from le to right: Akiko, Mitsue, Hisashi Daikoji. Project Native Informant London.
Bottom row, from le to right: Gaku, Kyoko, Kanako,
and a memorial portrait of Miyako, 1985, from the
series “Family,” 1971-90 © Masahisa Fukase
Archives Courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery
Archives. Courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery.
ere is one thing that’s notably absent from “Masculinities,” however:

penises. ere is objecti cation, though, explored via the erotic, queer,
and female gazes. Annette Messager’s 1972 series “e Approaches”
zooms in on men’s crotches in public spaces, with a long-lens camera
and without permission; the work reverses and reclaims the power of
the gaze. ere are fetishistic representations of male bodies, too, in the
leather thongs of Hal Fischer’s “Gay Semiotics” (1977), or the buffed
buttocks and bulging biceps on view—including a portrait of a young
Arnold Schwarzenegger taken by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1976. ere
is one striking, accid phallus, belonging to an anonymous nude man
dressed in a fur suit, as seen in a small black-and-white portrait from
1970 by Karlheinz Weinberger. It’s one of the few representations of
frontal nudity. Everywhere you look, penises are implied, but the
exhibition avoids direct or explicit depictions.
e show opens with a self-portrait by John Coplans that introduces

the promise of a different view of the enduring subject of the male
nude, which traces back as far as Classical sculpture, when the size of
the penis was carefully crafted to re ect the gure’s intellect and
character. Coplans’s work offers a “counter-representation” of the
narrative on the “the male body’s physical size, strength, and sexual
virility, considered essential markings of man’s masculinity,” Pardo said.
In the four super-scale black-and-white photographs, the body appears
soft and imperfect, but they are still posed to conceal the photographer’s
modesty.
Installation view of “Masculinities : Liberation through Photography” at Barbican Art Gallery, 2020. © Tristan
Fewings / Getty Images. Courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery.
Given that male sexuality is such a prominent part of the issues around
masculinity—not to mention the long imbalance between the way we

look at female nudity versus male nudity—the absence of penises is
prominent in what is otherwise a comprehensive psychological and
cultural anatomy of masculinity now.
Perhaps Laura Mulvey put it best in a quote printed large on the wall at
“Masculinities”—“the male gure cannot bear the burden of sexual
objecti cation.”

Charlotte Jansen
Further reading in Visual Culture
Did Ansel Adams’s Male Gaze In uence His What Judy Chicago’s Work Reveals about What George Bellows’s Boxing Paintings How Sylvia Sleigh
Landscape Photography? Toxic Masculinity Reveal about Toxic Masculinity the Male Nude
Jacqui Palumbo Aug 13, 2019 Jonathan D. Katz Oct 4, 2018 Daniel Kunitz Mar 4, 2019 Meredith Mendels
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