Customer Reviews

Naked Heartland the

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This collection of photographs are stunning, I had never heard of the photographer until I chanced on this wonderful collection. That they were taken in the 50's makes the erotica much more subtle but beautiful. I could spend hours staring at these amazing pictures.

Customers who buy Naked Heartland-and the vast majority will be either gay men, photographers, or sociologists-will experience both the pleasure of a formerly hidden slice of American History and the supreme disappointment of a, theoretically at least, "coffee-table" hardcover book whose quality is the worst I've ever seen. Bruce Bellas' studio work of the 50s and 60s is deservedly famous; it's arguable that the elegance and perfection of his images and prints equals those of any American photographer past or present. That he flourished in the tawdry, hidden world of so-called "physique photos" does not denigrate his achievement nor diminish the beauty of his work today. This book is from private collections of very early Bruce, before his studio was set up in L.A. The images are stunning, informal, and far more erotic than one would think-people really did have sex before the fig leaves fell in the mid-60s! However, this is a book from a publisher who apparently has never heard of graphic design, art direction, or typography. It is the ugliest book-for $50-that I have ever seen. The English text is filled with unbelievable typos, apparently introduced during production. A competent proofreader could have fixed this up in less than an hour. Worse, about 10% of the photos are filled with vertical stripes-artifacts that indicate either a dime-store scanner and/or complete incompetence in terms of production. The printing-barely adequate, with a single black ink, is subpar. And the type looks like Mac 1984 desktop publishing. It's absolutely awful. So, although I would rate the content 5 stars, I wouldn't even give the book itself-the product-a single star. Bruce of L.A. deserves much better-such as the earlier Bruno Gmünder collection-and the greatest tragedy is that this material fell into the hands of people who know nothing about art, or at least book design. (By the way, I was an art director for 30 years before retiring and have designed many books.) This hideous book is probably all we will ever get of this material, and more's the pity.