Dean Sameshima

Dean Sameshima is a born cruiser. His artwork is a careful dissection of images that reverberates through his fertile imagination. From graffiti found at notorious cruising sites to the empty spaces of a hardcore gay club, Sameshima’s camera carefully dissects the image and gives it new set of meanings. The crudely drawn depiction of penises rendered in a tearoom is elevated to art and the dark cruising bars where naughty things happen in dark corners are rendered mute in the daylight photographs of Sameshima. His exploration of the male nude is found in “Figure of Lust Furtively Encountered in the Nights (2004/2005).” Paring down hundreds of photos he found on the Internet, images of the male torso become the objects of lust. In an interview with a UK gay publication, Sameshima states that the series evolved after he noticed the trend among gay men to use “their muscularity as a first impression, like a bulging bicep or six-pack, and not the eyes which, as the cliché goes, are the windows to the soul.” What makes his work so interesting is his keen analysis of not only gay male desire but also of their fears that linger just beneath the surface.

Most of the photographs in your art are of the traditional body types deemed desirable in the queer community—buff, hairless, toned. Do you think that gay men will ever progress from those images or will these standards remain? What about people who are not of the tradition—people of color’s bodies, hairy bodies, etc.? Well I can really only speak for myself, as I don’t want to seem like a spokesperson for a whole “community.” I can only speak from personal experiences, research and observations. On that note, back in the late ‘90s, while cruising certain gay chat rooms, I noticed an increasing trend in self-portraits—men taking their own pics, with flashes and cameras obliterating their face and only showing body parts as lures for desire. I had a few thoughts about this phenomenon. First is how gay men seem to still be interested in a type of body: a masculine body made popular (whether they know it or not) by “physique” magazines from the ‘50s, but also the resurgence of a muscular and “fit” body that returned in the late ‘80s by the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, as a “fit” and "hairless body" equaled “healthy” and “clean.” There are “people of color” in the series, but I like the fact that, for the most part, you can’t really tell so much of certain races, as all you see is a body or body part. There are a few in the series with hairy bodies as well. Again, it seems like a popular thing for men to shave their bodies, which equals a more “youthful” body. As far as traditions, you have to remember that people of color, hairy bodies, etc. will always have their place within certain people’s desires, and even fetishes, but it seems the norm is a white, fit, smooth body for now. I personally no longer have a “thing” for a particular type of body. As far as progression, I have no idea, but I think not.

Also, another reason why I wanted to produce and present this body of work was out of annoyance and the proliferation of recent photographers. It seems that anyone with any type of camera (digital, point and shoot, etc.) is now/can be an “artist.” I wanted to make a comment on that as well. I am getting a bit bored at looking at simple, uncomplicated pretty pictures.

What is your opinion on the difference (if any) between pornography and art these days? I think these days it’s established that it is a blur. “Erotic art” and nudity have become more acceptable, and fears by artists, curators and collectors have subsided thanks to the likes of Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Kern, Jack Pierson, etc… I don’t think there is a difference.

From your “Outlaw” series to the “Figure...” series, your work has a tinge of sadness to it. Do you think that’s a fair reading? I never connected those two bodies of work with sadness, but I suppose it is there. A lot of my older bodies of work are more overtly romantic and tinged with a bit of sadness and melancholy for sure! I think when I look back at older work, such as “Wonderland,” “Modern Boys” and definitely in “Inbetween Days (Without You),” sadness is VERY evident. But another thing about “Outlaw” and “Figures...” is about a sort of “gay privilege,” nostalgia and a huge chunk of critique. —De Kwok

Mattias Herrmann

German photographer Matthias Herrmann’s best works are done in hotel rooms. Here, within the confines of the mundane hotel furniture and accoutrements, Herrmann playfully strips down, sets up his camera and challenges the notion of masculinity and femininity, the private and the public. He is his best model and Herrmann’s body of work is an engaging series documenting his relationship with his body, sexuality and living with AIDS. In an interview with BUTT magazine, Herrmann describes his work as “not about me as some kind of porn stud. It’s vulnerability. It’s not about gaining power, but more about displaying masculine power in order to take it away.” Many of Herrmann's photographs depict the artist invading the spaces of the hotel room, photographing himself in drag and wearing outfits created from what he finds around him. They are funny and sexy and yet childlike, despite the adult sexuality. It is as if Herrmann has been left alone in the hotel room and found a way to amuse himself by taking photos of himself. But lest it become too much form and not enough function, Herrmann finds a way to sneak in commentary about himself and his life. In one photo from his series “Hotel 2001,” Herrmann depicts his erect penis peaking out of a hotel bathroom with a note on the door, stating “This is Not Clean At All.” One can read it as a comment on the unsanitary condition of the hotel latrine or a comment on his HIV status. In another photo, an embarrassed-looking Herrmann sits at a hotel table with an erection. A placard near his penis states, “How Could His Mother Not Love This Boy?” You can’t help but laugh. Herrmann understands that the male body can be pretty funny and uses it to disarm the viewers by circumventing the dominant image with new narratives. —DK

Vanessa Beecroft

Gather a group of attractive women, some clothed and some nude, devoid them of any individual signifiers, outfit them in similar colored wigs or underwear, have them stand or sit in a gallery space and watch the art world circle and speculate. That’s the power of Italian-born artist Vanessa Beecroft’s work. Her performance pieces titled “Show” have been both praised and criticized by art critics and patrons. Some have called her gathering of living flesh as an exploitation of women and a fashion shoot posing as art while others have called these one-day only performances a discourse in body politics and the dismantling of the male’s gaze on the female form. Since 1994, Beecroft has traveled the globe, assembled women from the country in which her performance is to be staged and have them pose in art galleries. Her commands to them are simple: don’t speak, don’t move too fast or too slow, don’t act, allow “nudity to be its own kind of outfit,” and don’t make eye contact. What is striking about her visual representation of women is not the bare female forms but the way she has stripped their individual identity and left them to be displayed as a singular unifying force. Their bodies, rather than an adornment, become a uniform. Her use of the female body, whether in her staged performances or in her paintings and video, challenges viewers to confront our reaction to nakedness and our own bodies. —DK

Slava Mogutin

At one point, before being granted amnesty in the US, Slava Mogutin found himself the subject of discussion on the floor of the Duma in Moscow. The authorities charged Mogutin—journalist, poet, pornographic Renaissance man, eventual exile—with “Malicious Hooliganism with Exceptional Cynicism and Extreme Insolence.” There are few better ways to combine art and porn. Though he’s known in porn as Tom International (most notably in Bruce LaBruce’s "Skin Gang"), Mogutin has put up two solo shows of his own photography over the past two years. The most recent, “No Love,” complicates the one-sided desire of the erotic photo. The images themselves are often of men humiliated: some ritualistically (gagged, taped up, plastic-wrapped, forced to sniff dirty sneakers) and some via circumstance (falling, sun-blind, caught in the middle of rockstar fantasy). With their bodies—their asses, their chests—exposed, the scenes are powerfully sexual and often just as humorous. The faces of the subjects, though, carry emotions that make their humiliations harder to dismiss. In one shot, a boy with a half-full beer kneels on the floor, his naked ass pointing straight up in the air. It could be a hazing scene from a frat porn, if not for the ambivalence on the model’s face. Unlike porn, the image won’t be flattened to a simple object. The model’s anxiety, his tension, forces us to feel more. And it’s right there—that evidence of humiliation on his face—that the tenderness, the devotion in “No Love” becomes clear. Mogutin has made a career of his own exposure since his early writing in Moscow. Whether for sex or interviews, he’s been photographed naked more than he has been clothed. It’s too easy to say that his new exhibit tries to bring appreciation for the humiliated object of the camera. In Mogutin’s eye, humiliation and reverence are the same. —Ian Sherman

Thomas Ruff

The Internet has become a playground for contemporary artists. For bad or good, the Internet offers visual artists access to images of the human body rarely found outside of over-priced jack-off magazines. Like Sameshima, Thomas Ruff trolls the Internet for images that people have posted, blurs them and renders them alien and altogether unfamiliar. Using images of people’s posting, the German artist has reappropriated them to achieve a luminous configuration of human sexuality in its entire myriad of poses and desires. Ruff’s manipulated images are in a way an extension of his other straightforward portraits. The images of these cyber bodies have been hijacked and transformed from their intention of arousing the viewers and repositioned as a hazy, dreamlike vision. The blurring of the nude images reduces their sexual impact but gives them a tender effect. Sex acts and body parts are washed out and, at times, the visual impact of the images takes a few minutes to connect. Is that a vagina or a Raphael painting? Ruff’s found photo challenges viewer’s interpretation of pornography found on the Web and makes paintings out of the profane. —DK

Barbara Nitke

For most, “Deep Throat,” “Debbie Does Dallas” and “The Devil in Miss Jones” are associated with the beginnings of classic porn. For New York City photographer Barbara Nitke, these films are directly related with the beginning of her 20-year photographic exploration of sexual relationship and desire. Nitke’s ex-husband was the producer of “The Devil in Miss Jones” and when a friend of her ex-husband’s shot the sequel in the ‘80s, Nitke became the set photographer for the movie and each porno the director filmed after that. While Nitke began her photographic exploration by taking pictures of porn stars after the camera stopped rolling, her passion now lies in photographing the lovemaking of S&M couples.

“What I loved to shoot on porn sets were the behind-the-scenes moments, which revealed the boredom behind the sex machine image that everyone projected,” Nitke said. “But once I got involved in the S&M world, I became enchanted with the people who really loved each other and did S&M as an expression of their love. I wasn’t watching people do a job anymore, I was watching real lovemaking.” Nitke considers herself a voyeur of the S&M world—the third person in a threesome, sometimes the fourth. She has witnessed couples practicing various S&M techniques including enemas, hot wax, bondage, spanking, role-playing, whipping, Master/slave relationships and more. But what drew Nitke to photograph S&M was not the rituals or mechanics of the acts, but the lovers. "I wanted to capture the bond between them, and also the intense energy of ritual, passionate S&M. I wanted to photograph deep intimacy and trust, the two main concepts which underly most S&M practices.”

Nitke believes that people cannot choose their sexual orientation, whether it is gay, straight, S&M or vanilla. While some view S&M as sadistic or bizarre, Nitke believes it is just another way of making love. “I hope that my images convey the notion that love is love is love is love—no matter how people choose to express it. Everybody is hard-wired a bit differently, and that’s the beauty of all of us. We each have a unique sexual expression and I want to celebrate that unique beauty in my photographs.” Nitke is currently battling John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States of America, and the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA), which regulates free speech on the Internet. It is a felony crime to put obscene material on the Internet, which is defined by local community standards, and prevents Nitke from displaying all of her photography on her website. “Clearly this is unconstitutional. We are hoping to win our case and overturn this law so that artists like myself, who work with sexual imagery, can put their work on the Internet without the risk of being turned into criminals.” —Jeanna Barrett

Peter Gorman

“I’ve always been interested in nudes,” says Peter Gorman, a photographer whose nude photography differs dramatically from the typical porno-style photos on display in most men’s magazines. He prefers a more intimate approach, where he works almost in tandem with his models, allowing them to express whatever they want instead of directing each and every move. “There’s a certain power and privilege that comes along with people saying, hey look, I want to show you this. I get a high from it. Not just seeing it, but trying to make something out of it.”

Though he admits his motivation is partly the obvious appeal of being let into the private world of females who are willing to take their clothes off for him, he’s also interested in creating a body of work that stands for itself instead of just being some pervert who takes pictures of naked women. And his wife of 15 years—who he says he’s never cheated on or even thought of cheating on—doesn’t seem to mind. “The sex for me is the photography,” he admits. “All the power trips and idiosyncrasies that are kind of off or weird… That’s the thing—photography!”

When Gorman was young and looking at Playboy and Penthouse with his friends, instead of simply thinking, ‘Hey I’d like to bang that girl,’ he wanted to be the one behind the camera. And when he got his first 35mm camera at 16, his first thought was to photograph a nude. It started with his first girlfriend and snowballed into three book deals (his most recent “Stripped Naked,” is due out this year on Goliath Books), numerous magazine and online appearances and a recent art show in Frankfurt. Unlike his friend Richard Kern, who photographs mostly studied poses of sometimes professional models, Gorman prefers the unassuming look of dancers, actresses and non-models. He loves the idea of what they might show him. He’s also fond of paraphrasing Helmut Newton when it comes to defending his art. “Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is full of shit.” —Kristopher Monroe