Masquerading as health and fitness publications, these journals contained photographs of finely muscled, nearly naked men that were beautifully lit and classically posed. Now a gorgeous new book is celebrating these ‘museum-worthy’ images
In the late 1950s, when photography critic Vince Aletti was in his mid-teens, he stumbled upon a clutch of magazines at a local newsstand that seemed to speak directly to him. From their covers to the pages inside, the pocket-sized magazines were packed with strikingly composed images of nearly naked, finely muscled men, many of whom appeared to have a secret rapport with each other. “I remember getting really turned on by that,” Aletti recalls, sitting in his apartment in New York’s East Village. “I also remember being really worried that my mother might find those magazines in my room.”
Physique magazines, as such publications were generically known, operated on a coded system, designed to function as smoke signals for gay men during an era of heightened repression and censorship that lasted from the 1930s until the early 70s. The magazines, which were pumped out in cities across the US, made sure to pass as health and fitness publications, but the style and content of their photos were clearly created for the tastes and desires of gay men. In the decades since, physique images have often been written off as campy relics of a sad past, but Aletti wants audiences to consider them anew.
The models’ poses were frequently architectural. Photograph: Courtesy of Don Whitman (Western Photography Guild), SPBH Editions, and MACK. In his gorgeous new book, titled Physique, Aletti makes the case for such images to be seen not as mere historical documents or what he calls “porn-adjacent” ephemera, but as museum-worthy art. “The pictures are beautifully made,” he says, “and the photographers clearly took pride in what they did. The poses are artfully handled and the lighting and setting they used referred back to classic ways of looking at the nude. If these pictures had been flimsy or ill-made, I never would have kept collecting them.”
