BOOKS: ASIAN MALE PORTRAITS.
Over the past decade we’ve seen very few photography books devoted solely to Asian male models. Andrew de
Jong’s Men Of Indonesia,
Marcus Mok’s Liberated and books from Norm Yip are the exceptions. Asian Male Portraits is an extremely welcome addition, and these images are exceptionally strong.
Phillips has been working at his photography since 2010 and this book is something of a retrospective. One of the earliest images is a 2011 portrait of Peter Le, who is now famous for his website Peter Fever, and also several shots of Eric East (one of Peter Le’s porn star proteges) from 2012.
Some of the early images are of Sydney models and this is an admirable aspect of the book: it features models from a vast number of countries including the USA, China, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and Australia.
In his introduction, Phillips says his work developed when he noticing the lack of Asian male models in Western media, which he found “unacceptable and boring”. He was also shocked when some people told him that his photos would “be better if the models weren’t Asian”. Phillips credits these negative comments for setting him on his path.
The book is almost entirely portraits in colour, with a small number of black-andwhite images. It also contains an abundance of nudity, although only a small number of images are full-frontal. There’s also a striking series of images from China that incorporate gas masks as props, commenting on environmental and social issues.
The book is published in a handsome hardcover edition.