I’m glad that you noticed the Mizer photograph with a similar “Victor and Vanquished” theme to the image that remains my first memory of “physique.” The positioning of the bodies is similar, but the AMG image looks more like a rescue than a rape, and in any case, I haven’t found that original image again outside the pages of the magazine I first saw it in. Nor have I consciously searched for it. So many other, equally vivid and exciting images have come into my world since then.
Since I’ve always collected magazines, books, and photographs—from snapshots and Polaroids to fine prints—this is a difficult question to answer without going into psychoanalysis. I collect for pleasure—the pleasure of looking, reading and learning—but also for reference. When I did my book Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines, I researched it in my own library. In the first months of the COVID lockdown, I didn’t need to go anywhere but my own bookshelves to find things to read. Much of my writing is involved with visual culture—and the print delivery systems that culture depends on have always excited and satisfied me.
No. Most of Physique’s early films are in formats no longer supported by contemporary equipment. Whatever VHS tapes I collected later are now relics.
As I describe in my introduction, when laws censoring full nudity were overturned in 1969, Physique as a style was essentially over. Many important studios continued making photographs in their usual style, only now with naked models, and a number of these are included in ‘Physique’. But the artists were quickly swamped by amateurs. Exquisite lighting, artful props, classic references were passe—pointless distractions for an audience that was now primed for porn.
There are several colour photographs in ‘Physique’—and a few that were hand-coloured or tinted. But few in my collection. Most of the colour images I’ve seen from the studios I included were slides—colour prints I’ve seen were made later. I chose to focus on classic black-and-white images.
I’m glad you describe the prints in ‘Physique’ as being “in conversation.” Whether I’m putting pictures on a wall or sequencing them in a book, I’m very conscious of connections—especially pairings. I do open ‘Physique’ more or less chronologically before very deliberately mixing it up, but no arrangement is random. The more images have in common, the more likely they are to speak to and amplify one another, and when people are involved, they can exchange glances; they can turn toward or away from one another. And, ideally, they can prepare us for what comes next. Many pairings in ‘Physique’ are separated by a decade or two but time collapses and style, sensuality, and a certain seductive availability connects.
Nearly all the Physique magazines ran articles about sex and health. It gave them cover when they were accused of pornographic tendencies and allowed them to use cover lines like “Your Sex Urges!” “Your Sex Questions,” and “Personal Sex Problems…Solved!” Other magazines, like Grecian Guild Quarterly, may have paid occasional attention to gay issues—without ever using that term—but Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial always squeezed editorial content in tiny type under its photographs of boys in posing straps. Having had run-ins with the law in Los Angeles, and been arrested and jailed at least once, Mizer was always alert to legal and social issues involving gay men—again, only by coded reference—especially fellow Physique photographers. How many of the magazine’s buyers actually read these little bulletins or took them to heart is impossible to say, but in retrospect, Mizer’s irate, concerned voice finds echoes in the period’s rebellious underground and anticipates even more radical uprisings.
That Mizer image of the man relaxing while what looks like a giant dirigible gliding by is one of a series with an outer space theme. The other images that I’ve seen in this series are more clearly inspired by science fiction magazine covers and films. Commercial air travel was really pretty common by 1950, but this was not an airplane, it was meant to suggest a UFO.
As things started opening up and photographers began testing how far they could go, several studios started making what they called “at home” series. Typically, they involved putting a nearly naked model in various rooms of what appears to be a typical suburban house: lounging on a sofa, getting into the shower, shaving, talking on the phone, and, most importantly, getting into or out of bed. For the gay reader, this was an invitation to imagine a home life that, in Physique’s version of an ideal world, they could share. When studios went a bit further and set the same scenes with two models, it was, as I write in my introduction, “a tacit acknowledgement that, behind closed doors, countless readers had made similar arrangements, without the posing straps.” By the way, that portable TV was a modern luxury at the time. After years of enormous consoles with small screens, a set you could take from room to room with a big screen was something to show off.
The man carrying the suitcase was hardly working class—at least in Whitman’s fantasy world, that was his portable TV in his carefully decorated house. But yes, there’s plenty of fetishization in Physique, if only because the muscleman of that period wasn’t likely to be anything but working class. I’m not going to make any excuses for it. It’s a fantasy world with its own rules. Same for the bondage—the ropes, chains, and other restraints. Long before De Sade, images of torture were part of art history and Physique photographer were forever looking for classic precedents. Again, it is what it is. I don’t know what the censors made of it, but I suspect they looked right past it, intent on finding something more clearly illegal.
I can’t really answer this question, but there has always been a market for pornography, even in otherwise repressive times, so there will always be people who serve that market. Like the fully naked Physique material available to private buyers, porn had its own distribution network.
The images you mention, and a number of others in the later pages of Physique, were made when photographers began to sense a loosening up of restrictions—and began to test those restrictions. But I open and close ‘Physique’ with images of two men holding hands in rocky landscapes, the first in brotherly solidarity, the second as if off on a journey together. It seems to me there have always been pictures of men as comrades and men who came together to grapple and spar, but the suggestion of tenderness and caring that you cite was new. The embrace was new. I suspect it was overlooked by censors—it wasn’t really sexy, after all—but welcomed by readers.
‘Physique’ includes a number of Black men and other men of colour, including Hawaiian men from what Bruce of Los Angeles called its “Polynesian” series, but they were, typically for the period, in the minority. On the evidence of the popular muscle magazines here and in Europe, body building was a more integrated competitive sport than many in these years, so handsome, well-built men of colour were included in Physique magazines and in photographers’ portfolios more regularly than in other publications before the Civil Rights era.
As you note, it’s obvious that in nearly all cases, models applied body oil to keep their skin bright and shining under studio lights and even outdoors. Bodybuilders, especially competitive ones, tended to shave their chests and legs to emphasize the musculature, and that seems to have extended to many Physique models, who were encouraged to look as sculpted and ideal as Greek and Roman statuary. The tan lines you describe were mostly unavoidable for models in Los Angeles or any place with a beach or resort culture that encouraged what was thought of as a healthy tan. Clearly, the photographers made no effort to disguise them. It wouldn’t surprise me that tan lines had their own fetishists, but they were simply a fact of life spent in the sun with swimsuits whose size changed with the times.
