Vince Aletti’s book of physique photography celebrates clandestine visual culture

‘A friend who visits a lot, always sits at my desk (where I have all these pictures), and has never shown interest in them, really responded once he saw my edit,’ says the revered critic, collector and sometime curator Vince Aletti, reflecting on an early phase of his new monograph. ‘He saw the layout and said, “Now I get what you’re looking at”.’ Published by SPBH Editions / Mack, Physique is an impossibly elegant object with a rich interior of black and white near-nudes that goes some way to cataloguing the vast assembly of physique images Aletti began acquiring in the 1970s, two decades after his first ‘confrontation’, as he describes it, with the genre, while on a family vacation.

A clandestine visual culture initiated in the early 20th century (it continued into the 1970s; the bulk of Aletti’s archive is from the 1940s and 50s), physique photography was propelled by studios like Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild and the Western Photography Guild, founded by Don Whitman. Effectively a stylised precursor to contemporary porn, it was distributed in the form of magazines (Mizer's Physique Pictorial also first published the work of Tom of Finland) and mail-order prints, and established an early gay gaze in photography in an era when same-sex relations were a criminal offence and homophobia was normalised (indeed, several publishers were driven to print disclaimers, asserting that the sale of their content was restricted to artists and sportsmen – those who might find some inspiration in the work).

‘I started out collecting what I thought of as classic physique pictures, kind of clean and very mannerist, very designed,’ offers Aletti, speaking via landline from New York. ‘Little by little I realised that that was one way of working with the body, but I became more interested in more eccentric ways.’ Characterised by artist Nan Goldin in the book’s blurb as like ‘1950s Grindr in a world before Photoshop and digital intervention’, physique’s protagonists were typically bodybuilders, aspiring actors, models, athletes or ex-marines, usually adorned with just a posing strap, their bodies directed into various angles as they performed a certain, statuary-esque mode of masculinity (based in Denver, Whitman’s WPG carried the motto, ‘Men to Match the Mountains’).

In Aletti’s East Village apartment, the prints occupy various tower blocks otherwise comprised of books, magazines and further printed ephemera. ‘These are probably among the first pictures I collected – they were affordable for one thing, and the prints themselves turned out to be so appealing,’ shares the critic, who in 2024 was celebrated by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers for his contributions to New York City’s cultural scene. ‘The appreciation I learned for print quality, from these very small images, really had an impact on the way I collected photographs’.

Designed by Bruce Usher and fronted by a 1955, Cavalier-produced image of a young man draping his body across what appears to be a fabric-covered box, the photograph here sandwiched between slabs of white space, Physique is Aletti’s second collaboration with SPBH Editions, following 2022’s The Drawer. Similarly informed by his personal collection, that book is a wholly different beast, featuring images excavated from a single drawer in Aletti’s apartment, layered over one another with a complete absence of blank space.

‘The Drawer was very spontaneous and fun, but I wanted to do a more concentrated kind of book,’ says Aletti, recalling the new project’s genesis. ‘Bruno Ceschel [the publisher’s founder and director] often would come to my house, and we would always look at the physique photos together.’

‘The edit was the challenge, but it was the most fun as well, and really the appeal of the whole thing,’ he continues, referring to the job of assessing the stacks, boxes and drawers that usually accommodate the photographs, and then orchestrating a new conversation. ‘It was a lot about setting pictures up against one another and making connections that I thought visually, psychologically and emotionally would work. So I’m hoping people respond to the images one by one, but also that they see those connections, and that adds to the experience of looking at the work.’

A celebration of the artistry that made physique photography so distinctive, the book additionally asks us to consider the genre’s role, both within gay culture and the history of the nude in photography. ‘I want people to have a sense of what came before, and an idea of this pretty vigorous and busy community of photographers, that was very active in making pictures for an audience that had to be very careful about how they were in public,’ Aletti explains, alluding to the aggressive obscenity laws that studios had to navigate. ‘There were all kinds of restrictions on the way these pictures were seen at the time, so I'm anxious for them to be free. I'm not claiming it's art, but I want people to appreciate it as really elegant and sometimes astonishing.’

Physique by Vince Aletti is published by SPBH Editions / Mack £50, mackbooks.co.uk