Lon Hanagan | |
|---|---|
 Teenager Lon | |
| Born | Alonzo James Hanagan 20 December 1911 |
| Died | 4 December 1999 (aged 87) |
| Nationality | American |
| Movement | Physique photography |
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", [1] or simply "Lon".
Alonzo James "Lon" Hanagan was born in 1911 in Lexington, Massachusetts, the oldest child and only son of Frank and Lizzie Hanagan's three children. He had two younger sisters, Marry and Betty. The Hannagan's were a very religious family and although very close, it was a very strict family environment. The family had a piano and Lon played on it, imitating an organist at the church, which the family attended every Sunday. He started to work as a teen boy, with his first job delivering fish from a local seller. In addition to playing music, he wrote and published some songs himself as a teenager. His first published composition was "A Bunch of Good Fellows Are We", written for a musical, performed by "Good Fellows" group. He started to play piano and organ on a weekly radio program in Lexington at the age of sixteen. He also performed in local churches and events. He moved with his family in 1928 to Lockport, New York, when his father was transferred to the Jefferson Union Plant. Lon graduated from high school in Lockport in 1929. [2] In Lockport he worked as an organist at movie theaters. He befriended a local boy Ralph Ehmke, who became his first boyfriend. [3] Lon developed an interest in photography while a teenage boy, with his parents buying him a Kodak Box camera. He learned a darkroom skills in a boy scout camp in New Hampshire. His early photographs were images of his family, friends, and endless snapshots of Ralph Ehmke. In camp he also made his first series of male nudes, photographing one of his adult camp counselors fresh from the shower. [4]
Lon moved to New York City in 1936. He studied music in Juilliard School and for some time worked as an organist at Radio City Music Hall. He rented his first apartment at 617 Weat 113th Street. [5] He also continued to write and publish music during those years. [6]
In New York City, Lon met a number of physique photographers, and in the late 1930s was taught the basics of physique photography by Robert Gebhart (who worked under the pseudonym "Gebbé"). In 1942, Lon released his first catalogue of physique photography, and had a series of photographs of bodybuilder John Grimek published in Strength & Health magazine. [7] After the second world war, Lon devoted himself entirely to physique photography, abandoning his music career. [8] He was known for using Greco-Roman esthetic in his photographic work. He mostly worked with Mediterranean, Latino and African American models, which was unusual in the 1940s, when most photographers preferred white models. [9] His physique and beefcake photography was credited to his creative pseudonym, Lon of New York.
Though Lon was known for a camp demeanour in private, and sometimes photographed drag queens, his physique photography was serious rather than campy, featuring highly masculine models and poses. [10]
Lon's photos were widely featured in popular physique magazines, and he published several magazines of his own: Men and Art, Male Pix, Star Models, and Male Model Parade. [11]
His work is largely to be considered one of the pioneers of physique photography. He was a contemporary of, and many would argue also inspired, several other photographers in different regions of the country including Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles), Bob Mizer (Athletic Model Guild or AMG) Douglas Juleff (Douglas of Detroit), Don Whitman of Western Photography Guild in Denver, and, in Northern California, Russ Warner in Oakland and Dave Martin in San Francisco.
Hanagan's health declined in the early nineties. He died in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City on December 4, 1999, after a brief hospitalization. [12] His body was cremated and ashes were scattered at his mother's grave in Lockport.
Most of Lon of New York works were considered too "dirty" to be included in public collections during his career. Robert Mapplethorpe had some of Lon's works in his personal archive. [13] His work is also in the permanent collection of Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art [14] and in Harry Weintraub Collection Of Gay-Related Photography And Historical Documentation of Cornell University Library. [15]
Despite Hanagan being inactive in photography in the latter part of his life, his photographs were distributed in exhibitions in the United States. Some of his images were exhibited as part of the group exhibition "Photoflexion" in Los Angeles Centre for Photographic studies in 1981 with images of Muybridge and Mapplethorpe. The exhibition attracted the attention of St. Martin's Press, which published its catalog as a book in 1984. [16] Lon's work was also exhibited in several exhibitions in the nineties, including "L'homme at Home: Male Nudes - 19th century to Present" in Throckmorton Fine Art gallery in New York City; "Male", curated by Vince Aletti in Wessel+O'Connor Gallery; "Bonding" in David Allen Gallery in Venice, California. [17]
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, sparked a debate in the United States concerning both use of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech in the United States.
The Athletic Model Guild, or AMG, was a physique photography studio founded by Bob Mizer in December 1945. During those post-war years, United States censorship laws allowed women, but not men, to appear in various states of undress in what were referred to as "art photographs". Mizer began his business by taking pictures of men that he knew. His subjects would often pose for pictures which illustrated fitness tips and the like, but were also viewed as homoerotic material.
Bruce Bellas was an influential photographer of male nudes. Bellas was well known under the pseudonym Bruce of Los Angeles.
Jacqueline Louise Livingston was an American photographer known for her work exploring woman's role as artist and person and investigating the boundaries of intimacy and propriety.
Peter Hujar was an American photographer best known for his black and white portraits. He has been recognized posthumously as a major American photographer of the late-twentieth century. Yet Hujar's work received only marginal public recognition during his lifetime.
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.
Henning von Berg is a former German civil engineer who became a portrait photographer. His specialty is character portraits and fine art nudes.
Nude photography is the creation of any photograph which contains an image of a nude or semi-nude person, or an image suggestive of nudity. Nude photography is undertaken for a variety of purposes, including educational uses, commercial applications and artistic creations. The exhibition or publication of nude photographs may be controversial, more so in some cultures or countries than in others, and especially if the subject is a minor.
Philip Gefter is an American author and photography historian. His books include What Becomes A Legend Most, the biography of Richard Avedon; and Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, the biography of Sam Wagstaff, for which he received the 2014 Marfield Prize, the national award for arts writing. He is also the author of George Dureau: The Photographs, and Photography After Frank, a book of essays published by Aperture in 2009. He was on staff at The New York Times for over fifteen years, where he wrote regularly about photography. He produced the 2011 documentary film, Bill Cunningham New York.
Albert J. Urban, Jr. (1917-1992) 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".
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.
Victor Arimondi was an Italian American photographer and model who lived and worked in Europe before moving to the United States in the late 1970s. His early fashion photography, his portraits of Grace Jones and other artists, and his male nudes photographed in New York and San Francisco captured the pre-AIDS culture of the 1970s and early 1980s.
David Lebe is an American photographer. He is best known for his experimental images using techniques such as pinhole cameras, hand-painted photographs, photograms, and light drawings. Many of his photographs explore issues of gay identity, homoeroticism, and living with AIDS, linking his work to that of contemporaries such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Though his style and approach set him apart from these contemporaries, "Lebe is now incontrovertibly part of the history of twentieth-century queer artists."
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.
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.
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.
Russ Warner (1917–2004) was an American physique photographer. His photographs of bodybuilders appeared widely in physique and bodybuilding magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. His photography studio was initially located in Oakland California; he later relocated to the Los Angeles area.
