FULL FRONTAL ART
Photographer Paul Freeman has published another powerful collection of male nudes, Heroics II. He spoke to DNA about portraiture in the age of the internet, the epitome of manliness, and the hope for society found in a few sexy, straight men…
DNA: Congrats on Heroics II! What does it take for a model to catch your eye?
Paul Freeman: Casting a book is like casting a film. I decide on a theme and then look for subjects that I can make into believable characters. Most of the time, as with Heroics, I choose an array of different types of male beauty and then interpret them using context and lighting and costuming.
Do you pre-plan your set-ups or does it all come once you know the model?
I’ll have a general idea sketched out, but the model will inspire ideas. In this series, there was a guy at my gym with the most amazing curly blond hair and ridiculously angelic look. He turned out to be a Danish surfer on a working holiday and his look, in the context of shooting heroics, was instantly both cherubic and reminiscent of an 18th Century painter’s aristocratic ideal, or a 19th Century Beau Brummel dandy. The only slight problem was that although he was 26 he looked 14!
Do you ever shoot against type?
Yes. For example, there’s a bodybuilder in the book who wouldn’t necessarily be someone you’d shoot in an 18th Century powdered wig or as a 17th Century cavalier, but I shot him as several characters to play with his physicality and introduce elements of grace and sensuality to his look. It is a way to comment on how we too easily stereotype masculine types, when masculinity has assumed many guises throughout history, some of which we might now judge as silly, but which in their day were seen as epitomising manliness.
What epitomises manliness today?
In popular culture, the male has morphed into a homogenised extreme and, in many ways, is an unrecognisable, de-sexed, de-beasted, impossible caricature of a male compared with the infinite varieties of maleness and masculine beauty I feel I grew up with.
Then how do you go about finding varieties of men to strip for your lens?
I’ve tended to go for men on the periphery who wouldn’t necessarily think of posing for something like this. It’s often the case that those kinds of men have been totally surprised, then flattered, and then nervous, and, depending on how they perceive my work, willing.
Are they becoming more or less willing?
Men are increasingly hesitant. There’s an increasing stigma to being fully naked on camera and I’m not sure if that’s because of parameters set up by the online porn industry whereby men hold themselves up for judgement against a vast amount of endowed and fitness fanatical male performers and feel intimidated; whether they see pirated images spread like wildfire or whether it’s a changing morality in the real world that inhibits them. Because it seems the wilder it gets online, the more prim it gets offline.
Why do you think that is?
Our priorities are so mixed up in that we have no trouble watching an action movie with hundreds of people dying in a fire storm of blood and guts – but a nipple or a dick and it’s slapped with an X-rating and parents shield their children’s eyes. Why are we so ashamed of the human body and sexuality? Society is fractured into tribes. If the American right wing wins we stay prudish, if Europe and the Brits win, there’s a glimmer of hope our culture will evolve as the Judeo-Christian influence wanes.
Women are always sexualised, but at DNA our cover men are censored on social media pages, digital downloads, and sometimes stocked hidden behind the counter. What is behind this double standard and why is society so frightened of male objectification?
Men still want to control the sexuality of their women and so male nudity, which
burst out of the closet with the legalisation of homosexuality, is confronting to straight men because they are losing control. They feel insecure about their prowess and getting judged for the first time by women and gay men as sex objects. Their natural reaction is to fight back, which they have been doing across many fronts over the last 30 years of more.
Do you think this fear of losing control is expressed as homophobia?
It is homophobic in nature. Posing nude is too often characterised by straight men as something gay in a disparaging sense, so it takes a bold individual to ignore that. The kind of straight guy who will pose for me is usually (or unusually) confident about his own sexuality and a free thinker, in that he can decide for himself as opposed to being dictated to by his social group. To me, these are the hope of society: men who are not afraid to embrace what I do as art, who recognise that a naked male can be art. For gay models that is a given. For straight men under their own pressures to conform, it’s not.
Is porn in the eye of the beholder? How do you react when people call your work porn?
I believe porn is something made with the express intention of sexual stimulation. To be honest, I am insulted when my work is labelled pornographic. The naked male should be unashamedly appreciated as an art form alongside the female, and every other life form we are content to glorify. To dismiss it as pornographic is to associate it with something that should be clandestine.
It seems that even today the gay community is often ‘neutering’ itself.
We can now compartmentalise a neat consumer, respectable, married ‘real’ life from a pornhub virtual life. There were some young gays at my place recently, friends of my flatmate, who were flicking through one of my books and were a bit flustered at the frontal nudity. It was clearly a new experience for them to find this book proudly displayed in someone’s living room. But I’m sure these guys are more than acquainted with male nudity online and the depiction of male genitalia wasn’t a new thing, just its expression as art in a coffee table book was.
So is subversiveness the new closet?
When I first came out, what I was and did was still illegal. I was part of a subversive subculture that was growing in a determination to be out and proud. We knew that we were right to demand the freedom to practise our sexuality, but we had to be revolutionary. Now progressives have turned away from class and structures and towards symbols, like gay marriage, missing the root of all the problems. I’m now a subversive minority within my newly conformist subversive minority!
What is your take on gay marriage?
I understand all the arguments for it in terms of the inclusion of all people within a hugely symbolic institution, but we really weren’t allowed to give the alternatives a fair enough go. Yet, in an increasingly fearful society, I can see the temptation to find a partner, a “long-term witness to one’s existence” (as Vanessa Redgrave once put it) is hugely comforting.
Where is your art most appreciated?
A friend of mine restored a 14th Century villa near Terlizzi in Puglia, Italy. I was staying there last year when the young cool kids came to the villa’s bar and my host brought my books out to show everyone. I was taken aback by the reaction from the mostly straight young men and women. They looked reverentially at my work and asked intelligent and respectful questions about the style or composition. At one point, a young guy asked politely in broken English if he could take the book to the other side of the bar to show a particular nude to his girlfriend, saying “she will like this one very much!” I hadn’t felt so proud of my body of work in a long time. And to see men enjoying the work alongside their women without it being considered threatening or derided as homoerotic was extraordinary.
Who are some of your photographic heroes?
Bruce Weber was certainly bold and out there in the ’80s, popularising the idea that a beautiful male should be out advertising new consumer products aimed at men. Other photographers like Herb Ritts were inspirational during my formative years, but Weber’s candid moments of male joie de vivre struck a chord because they were celebratory and unashamed, and I’d never seen that.
more: Paulfreeman.com.au