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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sincere and from the heart, but the realization fails, July 27, 2000
Rod McRae is a children's book illustrator and gay art photographer who lives in Sydney, Australia. "Camp Cove" is a collection of his photographic efforts -- 60 black-and-white, sepia-tinted, and color photographs of men he found in and around Sydney. Some of the images are Polaroid transfers created for a show in 1992, but others are hand-tinted images created specifically for this book.McRae's technical skills cannot be faulted in the slightest. His composition is especially interesting. The first image in the book shows a naked man from the neck down, standing between two stuffed kangaroos. The image is fascinating for its unique Aussie sensibility, but also for its wonderfully strong erotic sensibility. The roos -- their paws and arms thrust forward, their neo-phallic heads, standing on their toes in erect posture -- mimic the latent sexuality of the man's own penis, which is slightly tumescent. It is this unique "Sydney sensibility" that McRae says he aims to capture in his work. McRae comes closest to achieving his goals in the sepia prints. Although some of the images are strained -- too obviously posed with plants, too painfully self-conscious -- others have a strong vitality and ease that draw the viewer in and make you part of the photograph. The color images are less successful, partially because McRae doesn't seem to have developed much of a philosophy of color. Perhaps it is that he hasn't worked much in color, which leads him to focus more on the model and the purpose of the image than on its technical aspects. The color photos also seem more thematic (focusing on wings, flight, and angels), but less interesting because the thematic nature of them seems to overwhelm the models rather than accentuate their innate "Sydney-ness." Similarly, his outdoor photographs are not nearly as successful as his studio images. Here, the models are more of an afterthought. In some images the models lay on rocks as if "scattered" like stones. In others, the printing process merges the shape of the men's bodies with the shape of the rocks. One is left with the sense that, despite McRae's goal of focusing on the men of Sydney and what makes them part of Sydney rather than Los Angeles (or Bondi or Manly Beach, for that matter), McRae has fallen a bit short. His focus seems to be on Sydney-ness, rather than on the men of Sydney. Often, the models seem lost, covered up, and obscured by the other elements of the photos. As art this works (and doesn't). As nude male art, it seems to fail more than succeed.
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