Albert J. Urban, Jr. (1917-1992) [1] was an American physique photographer. His work appeared widely in physical culture and physique magazines of the 1940s and 1950s. Scholar Thomas Waugh described Urban as one of the "pillars of the postwar golden age of gay physique culture". [2]
Little is known of Urban's upbringing or personal life. According to an article in the Chicago Daily News , he attended St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey, and played on the basketball team. [1]
A profile of Urban in a 1954 issue of Tomorrow's Man includes a photo of Urban with his daughter, though nothing more is known of her or of Urban's marital history. [1]
Urban, like most of the prominent photographers of the physique era, was gay. [3]
He lived and operated out of New Jersey and New York for most of his life, with brief periods spent in Chicago and Hollywood. [1]
Urban began his career as a commercial photographer. [4] In 1937, he began advertising his physique photographs in the back pages of Strength & Health magazine. [5] At the time, Urban shot mostly nude photographs. [6] The catalogue sheets sent to customers were doctored with "inked-in" posing straps, but these would be omitted from full-sized prints purchased from the catalogue. [7]
Urban's photography appeared in the first issues of Bob Mizer's Physique Pictorial in 1951, the first of a wave of physique magazines showcasing physique photography and aimed at a homosexual audience. [8] In the magazine's second issue, dated November 1951, Urban announced he would be publishing his own physique magazine, though it failed to materialize. [1]
Urban's career effectively ended with his final criminal conviction in 1960, which resulted in a one-year sentence and the seizure of most of his work, however he was seen to be advertising in magazines as late as 1963. [9]
Like many physique photographers, Urban faced recurring legal troubles in relation to obscenity laws. In 1947, he was arrested and jailed for sending nude photographs through the mail, a violation of the Comstock laws. [7] In 1956, he was prosecuted again and given a $5,000 fine and a 20-year suspended sentence, which he successfully appealed. [10] On July 1, 1960, Urban's studio was raided by police, who seized his negatives and prints and charged him with possession of obscene materials. [1] Urban succeeded in having the possession charge overturned on appeal, after having already served three months of hard labor. [1] He continued to fight to have his negatives returned to him, and wrote to customers seeking donations to fund his legal case. In 1963, the physique magazine MANual, published by Lynn Womack's Guild Press, printed an "Urgent Appeal" to its readers on Urban's behalf, referring to him as the "dean" of American physique photography. [11]
According to writer Reed Massengill, Urban became reclusive during the last years of his life, living on welfare support in California. [1]
Much of Urban's work was lost in police raids. [12] Urban entrusted what remained to a friend, Dominic X. Mondella. [1] The materials were ultimately acquired by the Doan Foundation, which published a book on Urban's work. [13]
Touko Valio Laaksonen, best known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist known for his stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and for his influence on late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
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Jim French was an American artist, illustrator, photographer, filmmaker, and publisher. He is best known for his association with Colt Studio which he, using the pseudonym Rip Colt, created in late 1967. Thomas parted from the endeavor in 1974 leaving French to continue to build what would become one of the most successful gay male erotica companies in the U.S.
Physique magazines or beefcake magazines were magazines devoted to physique photography — that is, photographs of muscular "beefcake" men – typically young and attractive – in athletic poses, usually in revealing, minimal clothing. During their heyday in North America in the 1950s to 1960s, they were presented as magazines dedicated to fitness, health, and bodybuilding, with the models often shown demonstrating exercises or the results of their regimens, or as artistic reference material. However, their unstated primary purpose was erotic imagery, primarily created by and for gay men at a time when homosexuality was the subject of cultural taboos and government censorship.
MANual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day, 370 U.S. 478 (1962), is a decision by the United States Supreme Court which held that magazines consisting largely of photographs of nude or near-nude male models are not obscene within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 1461. It was the first case in which the Court engaged in plenary review of a Post Office Department order holding obscene matter "nonmailable."
Social documentary photography or concerned photography is the recording of what the world looks like, with a social and/or environmental focus. It is a form of documentary photography, with the aim to draw the public's attention to ongoing social issues. It may also refer to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.
Herman Lynn Womack (1923–1985) was an American publisher, and the founder of Guild Press, a Washington, D.C. publishing house that catered almost exclusively to a gay male audience and played a major role in expanding the legal protections for gay publications against obscenity laws in the United States.
Robert Henry Mizer was an American photographer and filmmaker, known for pushing boundaries of depicting male homoerotic content with his work in the mid 20th century.
Fine art nude photography is a genre of fine-art photography which depicts the nude human body with an emphasis on form, composition, emotional content, and other aesthetic qualities. The nude has been a prominent subject of photography since its invention, and played an important role in establishing photography as a fine art medium. The distinction between fine art photography and other subgenres is not absolute, but there are certain defining characteristics.
Alonzo "Lon" Hanagan was an American physique photographer during the 1940s and 1950s. He produced erotic images of men under the alias "Lon of New York", or simply "Lon".
Physique Pictorial is an American magazine, one of the leading beefcake magazines of the mid-20th century. During its run from 1951 to 1990 as a quarterly publication, it exemplified the use of bodybuilding culture and classical art figure posing, as a cover for homoerotic male images, and to evade charges of obscenity.
Grecian Guild Pictorial was an American physique magazine published from 1955 until 1968. While ostensibly dedicated to art, health, and exercise, like other physique magazines of the time, it was understood that, in practice, its homoerotic photography and illustrations were almost exclusively created by and for gay men. It differed from other physique magazines in its focus on themes and imagery from Ancient Greece, which was seen by many as a coded reference to homosexuality. It has been described as one of the "gayer" of the physique magazines.
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Physique photography is a tradition of photography of nude or semi-nude men which was largely popular between the early 20th century and the 1960s. Physique photography originated with the physical culture and bodybuilding movements of the early 20th century, but was gradually co-opted by homosexual producers and consumers, who favoured increasingly homoerotic content. The practiced reached its height in the 1950s and early 1960s with the inception of physique magazines, which existed largely to showcase physique photographs and were widely consumed by a mostly-gay audience.
TWO, subtitled The Homosexual Viewpoint in Canada, was a Toronto gay magazine published between 1964 and 1966. It combined physique photography with a variety of editorial content including articles, reviews of local gay nightlife, and fiction. TWO was one of Toronto's first gay magazines, and was among the first magazines to combine the pictorial content of the physique genre with overtly gay editorial content.
John S. Barrington (1920-1991) was a British physique photographer and publisher. Barrington's photos of nude or semi-nude men appeared widely in British and American physique magazines, sometimes under the pseudonym John Paignton. Barrington published many of his own physique magazines, including Male Model Monthly, the first in Britain. He also published a number of books related to photography and anthropometry. Barrington was a prolific artist and publisher, and by 1984 was said to have published more nude titles than any other individual in Europe or the United States.
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Media related to Al Urban at Wikimedia Commons