Naked Heartland the [Hardcover]

Bruce Bellas (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Janssen Verlag (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3925443886
• ISBN-13: 978-3925443886
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 9.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,008,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hidden Gems from a Homophobic Past, April 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Naked Heartland the (Hardcover)

Finally there comes a book that does justice to Bruce of LA's work. It is merely a start: the photos in this collection deal with Bruce's early efforts at photographing the male nude, miles removed from his signature pieces of oiled-and-pumped bodybuilders in the 1950s and 1960s, and miles away from California. There is a definite charm to these images, a naivete that is preferable in many ways to the later works. Most of them feature ordinary men in humble, prosaic settings that evoke the works of Walker Evans and other itinerant photographers of middle America in the 1940s. The images reveal a charming aspect of that world with their dingy, apple-pie interiors that one only finds nowadays in early TV reruns and on the American Movie Classics channel. The male nudes planted in these settings hint at a subtle truth about men of the time and about American life generally. What's more they pose intriguing questions about the circumstances behind the images. One is tempted to piece together narratives, for in an age before Elvis and Rock in which male bodies were covered most of the time, one can't help but wonder how it was possible for Bruce to capture so many men in such uncompromising and revealing poses? That we're only discovering them now implies several possibilies: that there was an agreement that the photos would remain uncirculated; that Bruce himself considered them early works and therefore not worthy of reproduction; that legal restrictions about male frontal nudity precluded the possibility until the 1960s, at which time they were already dated; or perhaps all of the above. We can only be thankful that we have this book to round out the current image of Bruce as a photographer of slick hardbodies. These photos shock doubly in that they expose both the softer side of Bruce and a more hard-core side of middle-American life in the mid-twentieth century.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful images, beautiful book, October 31, 2000

By 

Brian Williams (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked Heartland the (Hardcover)

I returned to my copy of Naked Heartland after reading the negative review here, perplexed. What I found was the same excellent book I remembered -- not just Bruce's extraordinary early photographs, but also the printing and design, are, as far as I'm concerned, splendid. There are some typos, but this hardly seems a grave (or unusual) problem in a photo book from a foreign publisher. The volume is clearly a labor of love, reclaiming and rescuing a lost world of homoerotic experience and images, as well as a thoroughly professional and serious undertaking. This is a gorgeous book that I can give the highest recommendation.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Middle America, September 22, 2007

By 

MM (Phoenix,AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked Heartland the (Hardcover)

What A Find. Incredibly crisp, clear photographic reproduction that takes you back to a seemingly more simple time in what appears to be the rugged mid-west. These photographs are far from the more professional, technically lighted, studio column props and heavily oiled beefcake models featured years later that made Bruce Bellas famous. This is truly a must have for any fan of vintage male photography.