The Boyfriend Casting review: Rosie Harriet Ellis' handy guide

men in white briefs, from photography book The Boyfriend Casting by Rosie Harriet Ellis — (Image credit: Rosie Harriet Ellis)

'Find me 20 boys. Athletic. Abs. Good thighs.' Out of context, this line reads almost camp in its authority. In context, it is edged with anger and fervid inquiry. In her debut monograph, The Boyfriend Casting (2025), published by Libraryman, photographer Rosie Harriet Ellis charts a contemporary coming-of-age. Shot over five years, the project unfolds in distinct acts, moving from a tender domestic closeness to a cool, clinical study of the male form. The work is a personal undoing, a reckoning with intimacy, with the camera, with men.

'I needed a new boyfriend,' Ellis writes. 'Not one to love, one to photograph.'

The Boyfriend Casting

The first chapter serves as the book’s catalyst. It opens with a reclining male figure, echoing Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus before suffragette Mary Richardson’s blade slashed its surface in 1914. These early photographs, made while Ellis was working on her master’s, focus on her then-boyfriend Nick. He is held in a tender, near-obsessive gaze. The hues are warm and the light soft, but her focus remains exacting.

His body becomes a measured terrain: contours surveyed, muscles charted, limbs laid out like coordinates. 'He performed, and I adored,' Ellis writes in her accompanying text. What began as a mapping of desire soon became a source of tension. Two years into the project, just months before her degree show, Nick withdrew consent. Ripping up the model release, erasing the work. In an act not unlike that of Slasher Mary.

picture of nude man on bed from The Boyfriend Casting

Prompted by this rupture, Ellis cast a substitute. A pretend boyfriend. 'I also wanted to make him jealous,' she reveals on a call. 'There are many photographic layers and personal agendas at play.'

For the book’s second act, she and Nick devised a pose guide that could be replicated by understudies. A studio was booked, 20 pairs of his white briefs purchased, with their old duvet marking the stage. Act three, as it were, sees a series of men standing in identical poses, their bodies disciplined into sameness. Tattoos and hair patterns rebel as subtle signs of difference. The resulting images are chillingly anatomical. Even the light is homogenising and impersonal. Ellis explains that at the time she was shooting luxury handbags for commercial clients and lit these men in the same way, as desirable, interchangeable objects. The models appear dissociated from their own bodies. Standing there, standing in.

nude man lying on bed looking at camera, from The Boyfriend Casting

man posing in white briefs, from The Boyfriend Casting

After the sterile studio portraits, Ellis joined a martial arts gym (as in any good break-up) to understand why she felt so strongly about Nick. 'A big part of it was how obsessed with his body he was,' she confirms. These images depict wrestlers, not lovers or pretend boyfriends. Cropped, monochrome frames abstract these bodies into a pas de deux of power and struggle, classical in its brawl for dominance.

'I’m fascinated by masculinity, male ego, and have always been hugely jealous of it.' Ellis explains that a lot of her work is occupied with masculine fragility 'that sits so close to the surface', which 'could all fall apart' at any moment. This recalls Raewyn W Connell’s concept of Hegemonic Masculinity, which theorises the instability beneath masculinity’s claim to dominance.

Throughout her book, Ellis inhabits the authority of the male photographer. 'I really wanted to approach it like a man,' she confesses. In questioning masculinity, she adopts the male gaze, though its authority is as fragile and precarious as the very object of scrutiny.

nude man partially behind washed sheet on line, from The Boyfriend Casting

In the final two chapters, closeness and distance coexist. The images shift again, warmer and slightly hazy, as Ellis falls for photographer Gareth. Though initially wary of bringing the camera back into the bedroom, she is nonetheless compelled, and the chapter records this reprise of falling in love. Slow shutter speeds depict sex, cum, and the impressions of pressed bodies. This time, however, her own body enters the frame. One photograph shows Gareth cross-legged, head bowed. His body is abstracted, neither icon nor stand-in, held and framed by Ellis’s legs. This conclusive photograph, perhaps, could encapsulate the book in a single frame. As Charlotte Jensen writes in the foreword, ‘in trying to author the male image, she found she wanted, needed, to author her own image, too’.

picture of man and woman, nude, side by side, from The Boyfriend Casting

The Boyfriend Casting does not seek resolution; rather it sits in the tension Ellis set out to hold, between intimacy, pain, anger and desire. The images have the ease of Wolfgang Tillmans, the tactility of Nan Goldin, and the forensic obsession of Vince Aletti. It is not a feminist manifesto, no Mary slashing Venus, nor a tidy adoption of the male gaze. Like any good coming-of-age story, it is messy, sexy, and at times uneasy. It is precisely this tension, this relentless photographic inquiry, that gives the book its force. The abs and thighs, well, they are an added bonus.

Rosie Harriet Ellis, 'The Boyfriend Casting,' is published by Libraryman and priced €60, libraryman.se

picture of man in yoga pose, from The Boyfriend Casting

picture of nude man in shadow in kitchen, from The Boyfriend Casting