Men Untitled. By Carolyn Drake.

"I worked on the periphery of my subject for almost a year before turning to face it directly. Many months were spent scouting locations, arranging portrait sessions, searching for props, and hiring assistants before I decided that what I really needed was to get the men in front of me to take off their clothes. 

Despite having existed among them for half a century, I cannot claim to be comfortable around male bodies. The truth is, the male body is not a subject that I’ve ever been encouraged scrutinize the way we do women’s bodies. It’s as though the act of looking at men is inherently dangerous. Asking the men to remove their clothing introduced a degree of risk that propelled my fifty-year-old imagination even as sexual desire continued to elude it. 

Mostly, I photographed men who were older than me. Maybe I was more interested in seeing masculinity in decline than admiring male prowess. Or maybe older men are more visibly vulnerable, making me more empathetic towards them. Some of them unveiled their bodies with adventurous curiosity; others were willing to partly reveal themselves, letting go of their reservations as an act of generosity. Some got an erection and stood still in front of me, wondering where to direct their gaze. One person kept bending over to make sure I captured a view of his anus. 

Once I started stripping away the clothing and props and scenery, what I was left with was a body alive in time, like mine. Its authority dissolved when I took the liberty to look."

Carolyn Drake

"I really wanted to expose the body and demean it and play with the idea of seeing how far I could push men, even if they didn’t want to."

Carolyn Drake

"I realized that it was also a healing exercise for my psyche. I channeled a lot of pent-up anger to make the work, drawing from repeated dealings with misogyny in life and politics, including the restriction of women’s rights to abortion, over which I had no control."

Carolyn Drake

"I am a 52-year-old woman who has internalized a lot of personal and political rage over the years, most recently in response to the #MeToo movement and the U.S. Supreme Court decision on abortion rights. My hormonal impulses are also shifting. I wanted to channel all that onto the men: how can I subjugate the male body, and how will that look and feel to me? 

But on the other hand, photography for me is a way of connecting and empathizing with other people. So as I played with how it felt to look down on men and to mangle and twist and direct their bodies, I also found tenderness and began to see the ways they were fragile, and not at all fulfilling masculine stereotypes. 

I also wanted to look at the myths connected to masculine ideals, but without perpetuating them. The images are constructed, posed. I did not want to insinuate any of this as natural, so the feeling of staging and performance was important to me.

One of the main differences in the way I approached the men as photographic subjects is that I wanted to expose the vulnerability of their bodies and lay them bare. (...)

Wallace is a character I got to know pretty well over many photo shoots. Before he passed away in 2022, he ran a motorcycle club next to his house, and the inside, notably, was wallpapered floor to ceiling and all over the ceiling with centerfolds from Penthouse and Playboy magazines that he had collected over the years. This was always something on my mind when I visited his house to photograph him, so when one day he showed me an old picture he had taken of an ex-girlfriend, I knew I wanted to ask him if he would be willing to pose for me in the same position. He agreed to let me photograph him hanging upside down from a hook like a piece of meat only if I would also, and it felt natural for me to agree to it. What I chose not to do is publish the image he took of me. That final decision of what to show is where my power resides. This is about me authoring male bodies, not the reverse.

(...) The men weren’t all cis, actually, but I didn’t distinguish one way or another in the image titles. It’s not a project about youth culture and the diversification of gender identities. It’s about my feelings toward old guard gender structures whose power remains entrenched, and about how I too relate to individual people on that spectrum. Part of why I worked mostly with older men was that I wanted to see masculine strength in decline.

(...)

I had to let myself feel two things at once while making this project — anger I had boxed in and the empathy needed to make human portraits. One of the things they remind you in psychotherapy is that contradictory feelings can coexist. 

Regarding geography, the American South is where I began, but I eventually decided that the project is not about a particular region. It’s about an American brand of patriarchy and its strange attachment to white penises."

Carolyn Drake

- - - - - - - - - -

photographs via and via and via