Reversing the ‘Male Gaze’

Vulnerable Portraits of Men in the Nude

For twelve months, the Paris photographer Laura Stevens transformed her bed into a stage set for a series of portraits, and more than fifty unnamed men agreed to pose nude on a single white sheet. In most cases, she had never met her subject prior to the shoot, but after some tea and conversation, a new collaboration was born. “The shoots often seemed like a sort of hypnotic slow dance,” she tells me. “They lasted normally a couple of hours, or two albums of music. The same music each time: Bach: The Goldberg Variations and some Phillip Glass.”

Female Photographer Approaches Men Who Catcall at Her and Takes Their Portrait

Originally hailing from Colorado, Price moved to Philadelphia after completing her undergraduate and was immediately struck by the loud comments she received while going about her day. Repeatedly running into the same demeaning experience, Price decided to turn her camera on those who shouted after her, transforming the jeer into an exchange. The images feel bold and unmasked, their abrupt manner reflective of the uncomfortable discourse taking place.

Eve Fowler’s Portraits of Male ‘Hustlers’ in 1990s LA and NYC

Los Angeles-based photographer Eve Fowler is slow to divulge details about the “hustlers” she encountered in 1990s New York City and Hollywood; she prefers instead to keep their stories and our relationship to them ambiguous and unresolved. The Hustlers photographs, made in the five years from 1993 to 1998, ran concurrently with the photographer’s own coming out. She embarked on the portraits, she suggests, as a way of defining what the queer community meant to her and of carving out her own place within it.

Photographer Creates Vulnerable Portraits of Her Exes in ‘Ex-Boyfriends’

For Ex-Boyfriends, Boston-based photographer Laura Beth Reese turns back the clock, returning to her previous romantic relationships by photographing her former partners in near nudity. Where the project began as a way of chasing down the resolution that eluded her at the close of these partnerships, it became something much more: a reentry into the tangled web of her own feelings about each subject.

Stevie Raelynn Johnson’s Intimate Portraits of Thirty Men

Stevie Raelynn Johnson’s work involves exchanges she has with strangers and within her own personal relationships. In her project I did it all for you, she conducts a close examination of her own relationships, past and present, exploring the need to connect and the elements of give and take that inform each stage of connection. The brevity of Johnson’s statement carries an almost startling weight: “I did it all for you is twenty-nine versions of the one I couldn’t forget,” she writes.

Intimate Portraits of Just-Released Inmates Leaving Prison

For her series, The Bus Stop, photographer Emily Kinni began to create an intimate series of portraits of these men as they make their way back into the world. Here, upon release, they receive a $50 check, which can be cashed at the station, as well as church-donated clothes, and an onion bag to tote their belongings.