Once every decade or so, a new image, or a new series of images, changes the popular conception of the male ideal. Think of the photograph of James Dean leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette in the 1950s, or the Times Square Calvin Klein underwear billboard of the 1980s. Eric Schwabel's Shooting Male may well work a similar shift in the popular imagination.
The male form has been an object of fascination since at least the 5th Century BC, when the ancient Greeks sculpted idealized images of Apollo and Heracles, or memorialized a popular athlete in marble for the ages, and that fascination has never waned. If anything, it has only increased as the ideal has been reimagined by the ancient Romans, the artists of the Renaissance, the social realists of the 20th Century, and the comic-book artists of today. Through it all, there has been one constant, and that is inextricable pairing of strength and sexuality.
Perhaps in no medium has the modern fascination with male strength and sexuality been so overtly celebrated as the photo book, beginning with the 1950s "beefcake" books showing images of body builders in classical poses. But as such photo books have become more mainstream, many photographers have tamed the raw male qualities of strength and sexuality with an overlay of sterility, a trend which reached its apogee in the form of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.
In Shooting Male, Schwabel has stripped away this sterility and returned to raw male energy. In place of idealized images of buff boys with the sun gleaming from their pouting lips, here are real men whose sexual power is not merely hinted at, but on the surface. The men are porn stars, escorts, models, and regular guys off the streets--or in the case of Johnny Hazzard depicted on the cover, actually on the streets. And while some of the images are obviously posed (one beautiful shot in particular shows a man, contorted yet comfortable-looking, in front of a backdrop of neon lights) many of them--and the most compelling of them--are not. There is the man walking through a hallway of lockers, the aforementioned Hazzard on the street with this dog, and a series of shots that depict not only the model, but also the elements of the shoot: the boxes on which the model stands, the light-reflecting umbrella, the light meter. These latter shots take rawness to a new level: it is not only the sexual energy of the model that is undisguised, but the means of depicting it as well. Here is a power, a playfulness, and a sexuality that has become too rare in our understanding of maleness. Kudos to Schwabel for bringing it back.
If you buy only one photo book, make it this one.
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