Peter Weiermair

A personal collection of mostly nude snapshots of youthful friends by an anonymous Austrian "E.J." - hidden from the Nazis throughout the war, and kept hidden until well after E.J.'s death.

223 p. : 29 cm

A bakers' dozen of the best photographers of the past hundred years, from Helen Levitt and Gordon Parks to Nan Goldin and Ryan McGinley, are brought together here in a series of portfolios expanding on Robert Frank's Americans. Together they consider generations of social upheavals, crises, and shifts in U.S. society, responding to societal problems with attitudes from concerned to ecstatic. Helen Levitt's East Village and Bruce Davidson's are the same, and yet nothing alike, as are Richard Avedon's Texas and Rosalind Solomon's New Orleans, Diane Arbus's periphery and Lee Friedlander's loneliness at the center of the world, Peter Hujar's transsexuals and Larry Clark's boys.

The present anthology, Male Nudes by Women, edited by Peter Weiermair, reflects the current efforts of a number of female photographers in dealing with the male body. It reflects as well their critical approach to seemingly rigid gender roles and cliches, developed over a period of centuries, and to their own erotic imaginations.