Category: gay photography

Henry Miller: “We All Derive from the Same Source”

His Butt: Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Eleven

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” 

—Henry Miller

Gregory Maquire: “The Edge of Things”

R Breathe Photography, Untitled, (The Edge of Things)

“Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone’s horizon sweeps someone else’s. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.” 

—Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

Image reblogged with thanks to https://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com

Jesús Holguin: “The Sense of Secrets”

Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Nineteen

“What i like about Photography is that it takes moments that should have been forgotten, and just freezes them, and allows us to share it with everyone and share it with future generations. But there is also the sense of secrets in the picture, or the stuff you don’t know, or don’t see. You don’t really know what happened before or after a picture; its time is just frozen in that moment.” 

—Jesús Holguin

Rainer Maria Rilke: “(Life) Holds You in Its Hand”

 

Photographers Unknown, A Collection: Life Holds You in Its Hand

“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Born in Prague, Czechia, in December of 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke  was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets. He was unique in his efforts to expand the realm of poetry through new uses of imagery and syntax and with an aesthetic philosophy that rejected the precepts of Christianity and worked to reconcile beauty and suffering. 

In 1899 Rilke made the first of two pivotal trips to Russia, discovering what he called his spiritual fatherland in both the Russian people and the landscape. There he met Leo Tolstoy, L O Pasternak, and the peasant poet Spiridon Droschin, whose poems he translated into German. These trips provided Rilke with the poetic material and inspiration essential to his developing philosophy of existential materialism and art as religion. 

Rilke’s verse became firmly fixed in his major poetry collection “Newe Gedichte (New Poems)”, with its verses becoming more objective, evolving from an impressionistic personal vision to the representation of this vision with impersonal symbolism. The major influence of this was Rilke’s association with French sculptor Auguste Rodin, under whom he worked as a secretary from 1905 to 1906. These verses employed a simple vocabulary to describe subjects experienced in everyday life, transforming his observations into art. 

In the last few years of his life, Rilke was inspired by such French poets as Paul Valery and Jean Cocteau, and wrote most of his last verses in French. Rilke suffered from illness his whole life and died of leukemia in 1926 while staying at the Valmont sanatorium near Lake Geneva.

“Letters to a Young Poet” is a collection of ten letters written by twenty-seven year-old Rainer Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, a nineteen year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Kappus corresponded with the poet from 1902 to 1908, seeking his advice as to the quality of his poetry, and in deciding between a literary career or a career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.These letters offer insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke’s early poetry and his working process.

“Remarkable, this journey from the youthful music of Bohemian folk poetry… to Orpheus, remarkable how… his mastery of form increases, penetrates deeper and deeper into his problems! And at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear.”

—Herman Hesse, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art,  (A summary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s evolution as a poet)

Ian McEwan: “Waiting”

 

Photographer Unknown, (Waiting), Silver Gelatin Print

“Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.”

—Ian McEwan, Atonement

Born in 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England, Ian McEwan spent most of his childhood in the Far East, Germany, and North Africa, where his father, an army officer, was posted. Upon his return to England, he studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature in 1970. He later received his Masters of Arts degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia..

McEwan’s  2001novel “Atonement” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award and was the winner of the W. H. Smith Literary Award in 2002. The novel, beginning in 1935, tells the story of Briony, a young girl and aspiring writer, and the consequences of the discovery she makes about Robbie, a young man destined to play a part in the Dunkirk evacuations. This novel was adapted for the screen, with the film, directed by Joe Wright, opening both the Vancouver International Film Festival and the 64th Venice International Film Festival.

Ian McEwan is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded a CBE, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, in 2000.

Steven Millhauser: “His Black and White World”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Black and White: The Dark Images

“He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer’s trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible–indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible–therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise–well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.” 

—Steven Millhauser, Little Kingdoms

Walt Whitman: “Fulfilling Our Foray”

Photographers Unknown, (Fulfilling Our Foray)

“WE two boys together clinging,

One the other never leaving,

Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,

Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,

Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.

No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving,

threatening,

Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on

the turf or the sea-beach dancing,

Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness

chasing,

Fulfilling our foray.” 

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1900

Brian Andreas: “The Room Filled with the Sound of the Wind”

Photographer Unknown, (The Room Filled with the Sound of the Wind)

“The day he first told me he was starting to disappear I didn’t believe him & so he stopped & held his hand up to the sun & it was like thin paper in the light & finally I said you seem very calm for a man who is disappearing & he said it was a relief after all those years of trying to keep the pieces of his life in one place. Later on, I went to see him again & as I was leaving, he put a package in my hand. This is the last piece of my life, he said, take good care of it & then he smiled & was gone & the room filled with the sound of the wind & when I opened the package there was nothing there & I thought there must be some mistake or maybe I dropped it & I got down on my hands & knees & looked until the light began to fade & then slowly I felt the pieces of my life fall away gently & suddenly I understood what he meant & I lay there for a long time crying & laughing at the same time.
—Disappearing”

― Brian Andreas, Still Mostly True

Ray Bradbury: “Something Wicked This Way Comes”

Photographer Unknown, (Leather, Beetle, and Snake), Photo Shoot, Model Unknown

“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people’s salt and other people’s cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.”

—Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Gerardo Vizmanos

Gerardo Vizmanos, “Matthew Gillmore”, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Colorado, Date Unknown

Born in a small town in Spain, Gerardo Vizmanos is a photographer based in London and New York. He first studied law and worked, upon graduation, for law firms and companies in Europe and the United States. His interest in photography led him to study in 2010 for his Master’s in the Photography program at Centro Univesitario de Artes TAI in Madrid. Conflicts arose between photography and work, leading to his major decision to pursue photography as a career. Upon winning the International Talent Support contest in Trieste, Italy, he took his awarded scholarship in 2012 to study at New York’s School of Visual Arts. 

An openly gay artist, Vizmanos’s work revolves around the denial of set social constructions, including those of gender, that have become part of our societal existence, and the focusing on the essence of a human being. Born into a world where gay men are typically accepted only when they hide behind socially constructed roles, Vizamonos exposes his own experiences as a gay man through his work, while also presenting an inherent study of gay sexuality through his male subjects. 

Vizamos’s first work after the School of Visual Arts was entitled “No One”, which presented the idea of living without being someone. His first solo exhibition, the “Hidden Subject” series, presented as an installation with large-format images in dialogue with each other, concentrated on the idea of latent sexuality.The “Unidentified” series, shot during a period of personal struggles, dealt with the idea that grieving can be defeated only by going through the pain. He also shot a series called “Subject Matter(s)” which also dealt with body movement, nudity and sexuality, showing that clothes are just an addition to the natural condition of the human body.

James Baldwin: “Giovanni’s Room”

Photographers Unknown, The Faces of Man: WP Photo Set Eight

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.” 

—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Marco Berger: “Un Rubio”

Artist Unknown, (The Subway Ride), Computer Graphics, Gay Film Gifs, “Un Rubio”, 2019

“But if pressed, I’d have to say that what I love most about the subways of New York is what they do not do. One may spend a lifetime looking back—whether regretfully or wistfully, with shame or fondness or sorrow—and thinking how, given the chance, things might have been done differently. But when you enter a subway car and the doors close, you have no choice but to give yourself over to where it is headed. The subway only goes one way: forward.. . 

Every car on every train on every line holds a surprise, a random sampling of humanity brought together in a confined space for a minute or two – a living Rubik’s Cube.” 

–Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

Note: Initially released in Germany in April of 2019, “Un Rubio ( The Blonde One)” is an Argentine movie directed by Marco Berger. The movie tells the story of two men who begin a romantic relationship in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The role of Juan is played by the actor and choreographer Alfonso Barón; the role of Gabriel, his colleague and roommate, is played by Gaston Re.

Gifs reblogged with thanks to: https://doctordee.tumblr.com

Luke Nugent, “Lithunium Snow”

 

Luke Nugent, “Lithunium Snow”, Photo Shoot

Luke Nugent is a British photographer living in London and working internationally. He studied photography at London’s University of Greenwich, and has been shooting professionally since his late teens. Working primarily in the fields of music, portraiture and fashion, Nugent works with top models, musicians and personalities to develop imagery of a high technical and aesthetic standard. He has experience assisting world renowned photographer Rankin and has collaborated on various projects for Nick Knight’s award winning fashion website “SHOWstudio” including editorial features, video projects and live events.

Born in October of 1998 in Haarlem, Netherlands, Nils Kuiper, known as Lithunium Snow, is a model in the alternative modeling world, having been featured in publications like Dark Beauty Magazine and Gothesque Magazine. In 2016, he won the title of Mr. Alternative.

The website of photographer Luke Nugent can be found at: https://lukenugent.co.uk