{gay} – Page 204 – { feuilleton }

California boys by Mel Roberts

The Beach Boys got the California girls but it looks like Mel got the boys…some of them, anyway. Makes me wish I was back in Los Angeles again. More of Mel’s work here. Many of his models look like the “youngmen” of the period (late Sixties, early Seventies) that John Rechy writes about.

Youssef Nabil

Ballerina boy, Paris 2003.

Youssef Nabil colours his photographs so they look like antique hand-tinted prints. Plenty of striking examples on his site, including portraits of one of my favourite singers, Natacha Atlas.

The recurrent pose 2

Solitude (?) by Hans Thoma (no date).

A couple more examples of the Flandrin pose. There are other versions around but most are poor copies of the original. Hans Thoma (1839–1924) was a very conventional German artist whose work occasionally skirts the homoerotic, perhaps unintentionally. I may post some of his prints later. He produced another variation on the Flandrin pose entitled The Prodigal Son with the figure reversed.

An uncredited and undated photograph from a collection of vintage male nudes on Flickr. That looks like a Union flag so we can guess that photographer and model were British.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive