6 reflections on capturing masculinity on camera

Two sets of headphones and a bunch of dudes shouting on a screen. Richard Mosse’s video Fraternity (2007) is five minutes eight seconds long, uncomfortable to watch but difficult to leave. Described by the photographer as a “performance of masculinity and elite, white male rage,” the video shows some men practically laughing while others are red in the face and close to tears; almost half are dressed in Yale affiliated sportswear.

Made in 2007, the short forms part of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, a new Barbican show which aims to unpack how masculinity is performed, experienced, coded and socially constructed through photographs and films produced between the 1960s and today. “I knew it would be a timely show,” curator Alona Pardo tells SLEEK, “but I didn’t quite anticipate how zeitgeisty it would be. How it would feel.”

On display now through 17 May, over 300 works by 50 artists shape the picture, informing the exhibition’s intent to reconsider how gendered images operate in wider culture. Here, a trio of black and white pictures by Robert Mapplethorpe sandwiches bodybuilder Lisa Lyon between portraits of Arnold Schwarzenegger; meanwhile there’s Piotr Uklański’s critique of the media’s glorification of power for entertainment employs 164 photos of actors portraying Nazi officials; elsewhere Hans Eijkelboom moulds himself into several versions of The Ideal Man, and Marianne Wex’s Let’s Take Back Our Space series highlights gendered body language.

“There is a freedom in confronting imagery, putting images out there in the world,” asserts Californian photographer Sam Contis, who spent four years immersed in an all-male liberal arts college for her 2018 series, Deep Springs. Below, SLEEK speaks to Contis, Pardo, Sunil Gupta—the Indian photographer who reframed queer visual narratives with his pictures of New York’s Christopher Street in the 1970s—and Being and Having photographer Catherine Opie, about what viewers can take away from the show.

Alona Pardo on naming “Masculinities: Liberation through Photography”

“From the get-go, I was sure that the show had to be a bit ‘Ronseal’, to say what it is on the tin. In the 21st century, it seems very apt to talk about masculinities in the plural: there are many ways of being. The whole show is arguing for a breaking down, a shedding of these narrow straightjackets of definitions of gender, and so we wanted to be really inclusive and diverse and embrace that there isn’t a singular way. Liberation through photography —obviously we had the women’s lib movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s—and there was a burgeoning men’s lib movement as well, and it feels like that needs to galvanise and take momentum now. It talks about the agency of photography also, but it’s tongue-in-cheek. You know, do men really need liberating?”

Sam Contis on conversations between images

“The exciting thing for me, is a lot of these artists are people that I’ve been thinking about (their work) in relationship to my own work for a long time. As an undergrad, as a grad student, so to get to show the work in conversation with all these other artists is really exciting—to show what I’ve been holding in my mind for such a long time and these limited, imaginary conversations—to now get to see them play out within a gallery space, is thrilling and I hope opens up conversations for other people too. There’s an incredible history, over 50 years of work, and it’s very rare that you get to see that all in one space, to get to see this ongoing conversation historically, is a tremendous opportunity.”

 On the inescapability of modern politics

“We’re living in a time when male world leaders are refashioning their image according to what it means to be a strong man, and so we’ve got these very competing role models,” says Pardo.  Gupta continues, “We’ve been talking about this for 20 years now, how we perform masculinities, gender roles. But masculinity seems to be back on the agenda because we’re led by a bunch of male leaders around the world, who are over performing their masculinity, from Putin to Trump to the guy in India, they’re all hyper-masculine, overdoing it, over performing—pull it back.” “It’s something that has certainly been in the present news cycles,” states American photographer Catherine Opie. “As well as when we’re looking at a kind of rise of fascism, throughout the world, we often look at that in relations to ideas around the construct of masculinity and power.”

Catherine Opie on Deana Lawson, whose photograph Sons of Crush features in the show

“What she’s doing in terms of merging a documentary language with a staged photograph, and what she’s choosing to represent within them, is fascinating to me. She is one of a handful of favourite image-makers: she’s not afraid to still make an image out in the world. I think that we’re getting back to observational photography to a certain point, but there was a moment within the Pictures Generation that we forgot what it was to go out and look at the world. It’s interesting that, in 1991, you have the studio-constructed, Being and Having but then downstairs, in 2008, you have me wandering the world looking at high school football players [High School Football]. That is two ways I think photography has really shifted in the last 30 years, this relationship to ideas of documentary practice.”

Sanil Gupta on the reach of the work

“When I first started making [the work] there was little else available. And what was was was very hidden—people didn’t talk about it at art school, places I would expect. So, it didn’t really seem to have much of a presence, and there certainly didn’t seem to be anything to do with non-European gays. Nothing with Indian gays anywhere, either here or in India, so it became a bit of a mission for me to make pictures of Indian gay men, so we can start having a discussion. When I made it, I didn’t have any references, but now it’s changed because so much more work has been made in the intervening years. A lot of work I did was just for me or my immediate circle, it wasn’t meant for the market and it didn’t get that kind of exposure. But in the last few years it seems to have struck a chord – I just did a fashion shoot for Helmut Lang, then they had a photo exhibition of the old pictures and the new pictures. It’s relevant like that, in different places.”

Catherine Opie on changing queer culture

“I think that it has changed, I mean in 1991 those photographs were really surprising. I remember how people, even though they’re shot with a 4×5 camera and you can see all the fake webbing, people automatically assumed that it was photographs of guys. It was the beginning of those conversations. So, you have already this history being mapped out—especially with the AIDS epidemic, being mapped out in relation to such loss that was happening within the community. And I think that queer culture is photographed differently now. Behind us we have Paul Mpagi Sepuya, he was my grad student, the way he maps out his own body through self-portraiture and the position of the camera, is very different then the position that I was looking at in the ‘90s.”

 Masculinities: Liberation through Photography runs through to 17 May 2020.