Duane Michals once said something that I recall when I view nearly any photograph: Photographers never photograph what they can’t see, and of course the most important things are what you can’t see. It’s what you feel. What you feel is much more important than what you can see. And so that is why I had to write—why I had […]
Tag: Male in Art
A Torso of Men
A Torso of Men Composite male images.
Kafka-Kandinsky
A Kafka Metamorphosis— One morning, when I woke from troubled dreams, I found myself transformed in my bed into a Kandinsky painting. I lay on my scratchy canvas-like back, and if I lifted my head a little I could see my red and yellow torso, slightly domed and divided by arches—as if Wassily had been up all night turning me […]
Xerxes: Great Things and Great Dangers
It seems that among classicists there is some debate whether Xerxes actually said this, but some agree that the words suit him well. Like many, they hit me in The Expanse (S5 E2) when spoken by Captain Sauveterre. “Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the […]
The Union Case Photographs of Bill Travis
Artist Bill Travis has been creating a remarkable series of photographs entitled “Poems of the Body”: Enchantingly illuminated male subjects framed in 19th-century union cases. At a root level, these pieces are intensely physical. They have power sexually, erotically. The men are stunning. What I greatly admire is how this “root sexuality” begins to expand, like a drop of ink […]
Ghosts on the Fifth of November
The Fifth of November: Guy Fawkes, V for Vendetta, Anonymous, Subversive Resistance, Masks, Identity, Visibility, Invisibility. Imagine all of that November Fifth intensity bursting out of your soul? An interior Gunpowder Treason and Plot? The “ghost within,” who might be a twin or alter ego, friend and foe, Cain and Abel, Self/Other, one’s own object of desire. What occurs exactly […]
Brandon Flynn’s Armpits
At first, you think it’s a Brando experience… the whole Hollywood spirit come to life. But Flynn offers much more here. It is spirit, but the spirit is black. It is all in the black. Those Vanta Black armpits, dark jungles, the dark depths matching his beard, is upper lip, his eyes, his hair. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes talks […]
Bruce Chatwin Dissolves
Bruce Chatwin: Traveling, unfixed, nomadic, dissolving. Identity that spreads far and wide but nearly imperceptibly… underground. The way Deleuze and Guattari speak of identity as rhizomatic in A Thousand Plateaus… each of us growing outward rather than upward. This puts the emphasis less on power and hierarchy, and more on a plurality of equally empowered humans. Chatwin travelled and with each […]
Brotherly Love
I keep staring. It captivates. Title is Brothers. This tremendous love, but then I’m not so sure: I start to sense a deep rivalry. Perhaps there is more rivalry in love meets the eye. Perhaps Cain and Abel are lovers. By Bran Sólo: @bransolo on instagram and bransolo.com
