A look at the nude figure in early photography reveals a starkly different sense of beauty than what we have come to appreciate today. In these enigmatic cabinet cards and early silver prints, women with large rounded hips, thick waistlines, and bushy pubic patches pose in photographers' parlors against painted Victorian backdrops. The male models are sometimes circus and street performers: "strongmen" who made their livings through self-promotion. Their bodies are pre-steroids, pre-Muscle-Beach, pre-Schwarzenegger. They are as fleshy as they are muscular, more husky than lean, no over-strained ligaments or bulging veins. They look like middle-aged men, even when they are in their twenties. Almost as common in early male nude photography are an elusive group of men of truly average appearance. They stare quizzically back at the viewer as if this is a test, or as if they have wandered naked into the studio and are perplexed by the strange box across the room perched upon a wooden tripod. A friend of the photographer, or maybe even the photographer himself, the model is often a mature man, his physique showing no sign of exercise, preening or leisure time in the sun, on his face the look of a man experimenting with the new medium of photography as much as he is experimenting with nudity. The viewer feels more a voyeur than a consumer, sneaking a peek at a naked stranger rather than a willing professional.

Yet by the 1930s, the body type and features for the perfect photographic male nude began to be codified. While Hollywood developed a clean, chiseled look for its leading men, Germany's Physical Culturalist movement created the perfect athlete and soldier, and their publicity shots predominated in both the United States and Europe. Their influence can be felt in the male nude photography of that time period and every era since to this day. Hairdos and props may hint to the changing decades, but the smooth abdominals, the v-shaped torso, the pouty lips of an eternal youth, vary only slightly. And the tastes of the majority of people who appreciate the male nude have clearly settled upon these characteristics.

I have never had the same tastes as the majority. My tastes were formed in my childhood by the men I could see semi-nude around me: shirtless construction workers, the neighborhood dads cutting their lawns in swim trunks, Popeye and Brutus boxing, Bernini's hunky bronze apostles and Michelangelo's corpulent patriarchs that weighed down the pages of the secondhand art history volume my parents would pull down from the bookshelf for me. These were the men I saw and these were the men I drew. I cannot remember a time when I did not think of myself as an artist, nor of a time when I did not find men attractive. My awareness of each developed early and together, and each helped me define and understand the other as best I could in a Midwestern, working-class Catholic family. I drew the kind of men I liked to look at, and they were big and hairy, whether I was drawing the men outside my window or the saints I learned about at school. My parents and the nuns who taught me applauded my skills and encouraged the artist in me. Their naiveté interpreted the hirsute masculinity of my subjects to be simple hero worship on my part. However, each new drawing taught me private things that only the most astute observer may have guessed. I was learning what I most enjoyed in both art and in men: grown up men, hearty bodies evidencing hard labor, idiosyncrasies, hair and sweat, faces revealing a sense of humor and the experience of time. The men in my childhood drawings also taught me the power of holding a fleeting moment of nudity in an eternally charged image; particularly powerful when it is something a child feels he may never have for himself.

Even today, the men I photograph teach me things, especially things that popular culture often denies: that mature men can have active sex lives, hairy bodies can be esthetically pleasing and sculptural, and heavy-set men can enjoy being erotically objectified. As in painting, in photography the language of figurative art is more than the sum of the model's gestures and expressions. It is the dialogue between the artist's longing and exploration and the model's response to being recorded nude. The viewer who looks at the finished product must ask more than, "do I like that body...am I sexually attracted to this man?" The viewer must ask what the relationship was between the artist and model, what motivated each to be in this often-artificial setting. From the subtleties of the model's expression and pose can we ascertain the unspoken desires and subconscious explorations of both the model and the artist? The more commercial, the more codified, the more stylized the image is, the harder it is for the viewer to find answers to these questions and the work becomes a presentation of what we already believe. The more willing the photographer or artist is to allow his or her dialog with the subject to come through in the image, the more the viewer is invited to join the exploration.

The photographer Reed Massengill commented that my work was akin to that of a time when nude photography was a more "equal opportunity" art form. I liked that comparison because it confirmed a connection of my exploration to that of the early nude photographers whose work reveals a curiosity for the medium and the subject as much as for the nudity. Another reviewer remarked that she sensed a search for my personal understanding of my own masculinity in the large, hairy men I choose to photograph, a search I may never complete. And several observers have written to express their gratitude because my photographs in some way confirmed or somehow justified their own attractions to a certain "type" of man they do not often see celebrated in popular culture. I am pleased that when my work is at its best it is free enough of convention to invite viewers to join the model and me in our dialog and exploration. And, in turn, when I listen carefully to my audience, the dialog continues for me as well.

Jay Woolsrake

Woolsrake Photography

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As a professional male nude and portrait photographer and artist, based in New York City since 1989, I have enjoyed capturing the male form in photography and painting for over 30 years.