Type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Male nude photography |
Founded | Los Angeles (1945) |
Headquarters | El Cerrito, California, US |
Products | Homoerotic photography, Films and Publications |
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.
Mizer established the Guild in December 1945 after spending the earlier part of the year taking photographs at Venice Beach and the offices were based around his life-long home. [1] [2] The formula used by AMG consisted of images (moving and still) of hunky young men doing bodybuilding poses, or perhaps wrestling in pairs or acting out improvised scenes. Mizer did appear in court to face several charges over the years, including obscenity, drug use, and prostitution. Allegedly, Mizer's AMG models would sometimes earn extra money renting themselves out as gay for pay hustlers, but Mizer argued vigorously that it was not his business what they did on their own time. Despite some legal setbacks, AMG survived its many trials.
The AMG material (sold in the form of photographic prints, magazines, and short films) slowly evolved over time, from altered images where the male genitalia were painted over or otherwise covered, to photographic prints where the models wore extremely skimpy posing straps, and then finally, as the changing laws allowed, to full nudity. He used his quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial which featured other artists such as Tom of Finland and MATT, as means of advertising his material. [3] [4] [5] Several bodybuilders and actors of the day got their start posing for Mizer and his friends at AMG. It is estimated that he shot over 10,000 men throughout the course of his career. Andy Warhol's protégé Joe Dallesandro was one of the many AMG models that even those not acquainted with Athletic Model Guild might be familiar with. Others included Ed Fury and Glenn Corbett of 77 Sunset Strip , and Susan Hayward and Alan Ladd. Bodybuilder and future Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger posed for AMG under Mizer in 1975. [6]
Editorials in Physique Pictorial claimed that AMG had 35,000 photographs in its library by 1957. Two years later, the figure had risen to 50,000. [7]
After Mizer's death in May 1992, Wayne Stanley, a friend and legal advisor, tended to his archives. In 2004 the company and its archives were sold to physique photographer Dennis Bell.[ citation needed ] Under Bell's reins, Athletic Model Guild continues to operate as Bob Mizer Foundation. The 1998 movie Beefcake , directed by Thom Fitzgerald, combines documentary footage with fictionalized dramatizations in an attempt to tell the story of Mizer and AMG.
In 2016, Taschen published a book featuring one thousand of the Guild's models, a reprint of a 1957 publication of the same name. [8] [9]
Beefcake is a performance or a form of glamour photography depicting a large and muscular male body. Beefcake is also a publication genre. A role a person plays in a performance may be called beefcake. The term was believed to be first used by Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky.
Touko Valio Laaksonen, known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced 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.
Bruce Harry Bellas was an American photographer. He was influential in his work with male physiques and nudes. Bellas was well known under the pseudonym Bruce of Los Angeles.
Pornographic magazines or erotic magazines, sometimes known as adult magazines or sex magazines, are magazines that contain content of an explicitly sexual nature. Publications of this kind may contain images of attractive naked subjects, as is the case in softcore pornography, and, in the usual case of hardcore pornography, depictions of masturbation, oral, manual, vaginal, or anal sex.
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.
Beefcake (1999) is a docudrama homage to the muscle magazines of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—in particular, Physique Pictorial magazine, published quarterly by Bob Mizer of the Athletic Model Guild. It was inspired by a picture book by F. Valentine Hooven III and was directed by Thom Fitzgerald.
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.
Ed Fury was an American bodybuilder, actor, and model. He is best known for starring in a number of "sword-and-sandal" films in the 1950s and 1960s. Fury returned to acting in the early 1970s and appeared mostly in small parts in television series.
George Quaintance was an American artist, famous for his "idealized, strongly homoerotic" depictions of men in mid-20th-century physique magazines. Using historical settings to justify the nudity or distance the subjects from modern society, his art featured idealized muscular, semi-nude or nude male figures; Wild West settings were a common motif. His artwork helped establish the stereotype of the "macho stud" who was also homosexual, leading him to be called a "pioneer of a gay aesthetic". He was an influence on many later homoerotic artists, such as Tom of Finland.
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.
Rick Cassidy was an American pornographic actor, model and bodybuilder. He appeared in both straight and gay porn films, using the name Jim Cassidy for the latter, during the early 1970s.
Harry Bush (1925–1994) was an American artist known for his homoerotic illustrations. Bush's highly detailed boy next door-style depictions of men made him one of the most notable artists of the era of beefcake magazines.
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.
Tomorrow's Man was a digest size physique magazine published from 1952 to 1971. It was one of the first physique magazines, debuting a year after Bob Mizer's Physique Pictorial. It was the creation of Irvin ("Irv") Johnson, a Chicago gym owner and trainer. As of 1957, it had the highest circulation of any physique magazine in the United States. It was the first of many physique magazines to feature the artwork of Dom Orejudos. Tomorrow's Man was initially edited by William Bunton, who went on to work for competing magazine VIM in May 1954.
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.
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.
Charles Edward Kerbs, better known by his pen name MATT, was an American artist, actor, and playwright active in the late twentieth century, known for his erotic comics and illustrations.
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