Customer Reviews

Male Nudes (Passionate Pursuits S.)

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If you are interested in nude photography and nude males in general then this book may be something for you!

If you prefer to look at beautiful naked males then do not buy this book!

Of course taste is different from person to person but using a general guide line I would say the beauty of the models is ranging from average to below average with a few exceptions.

There are around 90 pictures in the book. Around 40 of those pictures are just pictures of faces. I still fail to see how a picture of just a face can be considered a "nude" picture.

Of all the pictures in the book, none of them have complete frontal nudity! Yes, none! So there are no pictures in the book where one can see genitals of the models.

Philippe Castetbon and Francois Rousseau's "Male Nudes" was a pleasant discovery when I visited my favorite Chicago bookshop, Unabridged Books. At full price though, I had to go to Amazon.

There's a flood of photography books currently in the market and most of the ones loosely categorized under the `male photography' banner are, unfortunately, pretty bad. They're either too pretentious or lacking in taste. Some of the best in this group include "Fun?Game" by Lalli, "Dieux du Stade" also by Rousseau, "Just Between Us" by Gorman, "Chop Suey Club" by Weber, and "Summer Souvenirs" by Haak. The following titles not only are superlative but also veer away from the typically Eurocentric male photo book by focusing on or giving equal time to Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, and/or African male bodies: "Torero" by Afanador, "Pierre et Gilles: The Complete Works" by Marcade, et al., "Body & Soul" and "More Body, More Soul" by Thomas, "Midnight" by Gottfried (a photo essay with a lone male subject dealing with mental illness), and the particularly exceptional "Athlete" by Schatz.

"Male Nudes" is the latest addition to this short list. Rousseau is known in the States for photographing the Dieux du Stade series (horribly called "Locker Room Nudes" locally). These 2 books and 1 other, "Prince of Tides", solidify his status for me as the most interesting photographer of the male form at the moment. (He has another book, "Amor Causa", which I have yet to see.) Rousseau always manages to successfully tiptoe the line between eroticism and pornography. The mood is more sensual than sexual. You get hints and suggestions rather than sensory overload. His subject choices are a fascinating group; whereas Bruce Weber's are typically middle of the road white, New York Italian sometimes, Rousseau's are usually of Middle Eastern or African descent, European by citizenship, in addition to the Caucasian staple. (Rousseau himself is just about as attractive as his subjects.)

This book bares these men's bodies, a couple of full frontal images included, and offers a glimpse of their souls, expressing snippets of how they feel about themselves, their lives, their homes, their families, their bodies, their work, their ethnicities, etc. They are dancers, acrobats, models, Cuban, Algerian, Mexican, Belgian, French, etc. Those who are used to straight out photography of the male body might be put off but I think it's a welcome change, a smarter, more poetic angle on the usual. "Male Nudes" has the most beautiful group of subjects I've seen in any book. Lazaro, the brown and amazingly beautiful Cuban dancer aching for his motherland, and Luchino, the part-Indonesian model named after the Italian film icon, are some of the standouts.

"Male Nudes" is a sweet concoction of the verbal and the visual. It's the creation of an able writer and photographer and it shows.

If you are interested in appreciating the bodies of a wide variety of men in various states of undress AND glimpsing the respective spirits of these same men, through their own words, then this book is for you! As a photographer of male nudes and men in general, I found this book to be an elegantly intimate meditation on the male nude, especially if "nude" means revealing oneself physically and inwardly. With the joining of Rousseau's cystalline photography with Castetbon's effortless text, I found myself enjoying a greater sense of erotic and spiritual closeness with each of the the models. Bravo to Francois and Phillippe! This book will be prized by me forever.

This book has approximately 90 photos each of which are very different. It also contains many different kinds of models, lighting, etc. The common thread is the focus on the artistic representation of the male form. I believe for most people this wouldn't be considered pornography or even erotica. It is a good book for learning about photographic lighting, different ways of using film to get certain effects and different ways of photographing males. It does not give detailed instructions on how to take specific shots, but it would be most helpful to a photographer or artist to get ideas from.



While the book is quite beautiful, it is not the kind of book I am going to hang on to because I mostly appreciate the photography, painting and sculpting of the female form. I particularly like the absence of distinct lines and the necessity to represent weight, shape, volume and other subtle nuances without as many clear lines and contrast. In short, the cost/benefit ration isn't there for me once I've reviewed the book. However, if I was drawing more these days, I would reconsider because of the way the musculature, bone structure and three-dimensional aspects of the photograph are represented.



If you are looking for art and not pornography, you will probably appreciate this as a coffee table type book. If you have a high interest in photography and fine art, you will appreciate it even more.

MALE NUDES/ PASSIONATE PURSUITS is an art book by the gifted photographer François Rousseau (Dieux du Stade: The French National Rugby Team, Princes of the Sea, Amor Causa, Men in Motion: The Art and Passion of the Male Dancer, Wet Men), but this book is different form his other very beautifully designed books on photographs of the male nude. For this venture François Rousseau worked with his long term friend Philippe Castetbon to present the male nude not for the idea of sensationalism but a an entry for each of the models photographed to speak about their self perceptions and their thoughts about posing for Rousseau.

Rousseau and Castetbon have published other collections of conceptual photography that elect to go beneath the obvious allure of using images of beautifully developed bodies to make political statements: one collaboration was a monograph on the thirty or so people who knew young heroes of the French Resistance, all of who had fallen in the Liberation of Paris in August 1944. Castetbon asked Rousseau to create portraits of these witnesses and the result was the memorable volume 'Ici est tombé' For this particular essay MALE NUDES the two men once again collaborated to explore the physical and spiritual presence of men from around the world - dancers, acrobats, models, Cuban, Algerian, Mexican, Belgian, French, Indonesian, etc. Rousseau provided the photographs - a rich range of fully finished photographs in both black and white and color along with 'reproduced' film strips that add the sense of spontaneity to the book. Castetbon interviewed each of the 'models' and paraphrased their comments in brief paragraphs that appear throughout the book with the image of that particular model whose words and thoughts are being shared.

These images are from sports events, play in the ocean, and facial portraits from the Sahara to Cuba, from the Basque country to the inner cities of North America. The men range in image from massively muscular to acrobatic dancers to simple and gentle appearing cooks, and laborers - men from all walks of life - the unifying aspect is their shared ability to talk about themselves in the most private manner. This book is more a study of men who become nude because they are willing to shed the veils of life's restrictions that hide their inner thoughts. This is a touching and elegant book. Grady Harp, January 12

"Implied nudity" is a term photographers use to mean the subject is obviously not wearing clothing, but you don't see the "x-rated" parts. That term would be useful in describing this book, as there's always a hand in just the right place to cover the shame, and group shots where, amazingly, everyone is at just the right angle to prevent the camera from seeing too much or where everyone just happens to be covered in the right spots by a tree branch, a rock or someone else's knee. In other words, it doesn't look natural. In a number of shots the offending genitals are simply cropped out. Implied nudes are fine, perhaps even the best, so long as it appears the shots are created for their artistry, rather than for hiding what might be shameful to some.

I'm simply saying that for a book in the third millennium to tout itself as "nudes" and then to present itself so prudishly, the work comes off as awkward and the title as misleading. Would a book of mug shots be a book of "nudes" just because the subjects were naked when their faces were photographed?

If you wanted a book of artistic nudes, and were able to examine a number of such books before purchasing, it is hard for me to imagine this one would be most people's choice. It is precisely the kind of presentation you'd find in such books before the 1970s when the male body was still considered taboo.