What / How / Why

Task: Write a 300 word description of your work 100 words = what? / 100=How? / 100= why?

In Exceptional Encounters I take portraits of naked men in hotel rooms. The rooms are colorful and heavily decorated, almost kitschy. The age of the men ranges roughly from 22 to 50, some of them are substantially tattooed. The portraits are large format color photographs and show the men's unveiled bodies in a direct manner. The lighting in the photographs is even and the subjects often return the photographers gaze and look into the camera. A distance and tension is created between the photographer's eye and the subjects.

To find my subjects I went onto an online sex dating site. There I contacted numerous heterosexual men with my request to photograph them naked. I made my choice based on the profile pictures I could see online. Prior to the meeting we spoke on the phone to fix date and time and I then chose a room in a hotel that I had selected beforehand. I made my models sign a form in advance that allowed me to use any of the images for my own purposes. We then met in the hotel one on one and I took their pictures in sessions that lasted for approximately two hours.

Ever since I can remember I've always enjoyed looking at pictures of naked people. These images were feeding my hungry gaze. Engaging with feminism and queer theory I soon realized that the genre of the nude actually means more or less naked woman. While the genre claims naturalism it indeed is a highly constructed genre especially with regard to gender and power relations. Male nudes do exist all throughout the history, but almost all of these images are taken by other men who are expressing a gay longing. Even though I do like the images I feel excluded from the audience and that bothers me. I believe that creating work that deals with desire in some sense is a way of negotiating sexuality and also a negotiation of gender and power. As those subjects are dear to me I want to be part of that discourse.