What does it mean to be a man today?

Across different cultures and spaces, the military has been central to the construction of masculine identities...

Adi Nes’ evocative and meticulously staged series Soldiers, shows young men performing as infantry soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces - sleeping, resting, smoking and generally larking around.

Nes infuses his images of the military with homoeroticism but also reveals the strong homosocial bonds that exist between soldiers.

While covering the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Thomas Dworzak came across a handful of photo studios in Kandahar which despite the Taliban’s ban on photography had been authorised to remain open to take identity photos.

These striking colour portraits were found in the back rooms of these studios and show Taliban fighters posing in front of scenic backdrops, holding hands, using guns or flowers as props or enveloped in a halo of vibrant colours, their eyes heavily made up with black kohl - a stark contrast to our conventional image of the hypermasculine soldier.

Athleticism often goes hand in hand with strength which is usually associated with masculinity. But in Catherine Opie’s tender portrait series, High School Football, her subjects stare into the lens, revealing a vulnerable youthfulness that juxtaposes itself with the aggressive, hypercompetitive and emotionally disconnected energy associated with American football culture.

Rineke Dijkstra’s (b. 1959, Netherlands) series Bullfighters shows four Portuguese forcados (bullfighters) fresh from the fight, their faces bloodied, their delicate brocaded uniforms ripped, their perfectly coiffed hair askew and dusty and their physical exhaustion palpable.

In this section, we look at the construction of male power,
gender and class. The artists have all tried to expose and subvert how
masculine behaviours have created inequalities between gender identities. 

The wall of photos in Richard Avedon’s The Family, speaks volumes about male power. In the lead up to the US presidential election in 1976, Avedon photographed the key politicians, military men, lawmakers and captains of industry who clasped the reins of political, economic and cultural power in their hands.

You’ll find the likes of Henry Kissinger, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan…alongside bankers, media trendsetters, publishers – a nod to the many forces that contribute to the shaping of the highest office in America.

Gentlemen, 1981–83, by Karen Knorr is made up of 26 black-and-white photographs, each accompanied by short texts. Taken in the opulent architectural interiors of all-male private members’ clubs near St. James Park in London, these photographs show the club interiors – filled with portraits of past premiers and leather armchairs – and their members - typically besuited white men.

Offering us sardonic insight into these 'corridors of power', it's hard not to notice the absence of women (the closest then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher got to access was as a bronze bust) and other marginalised msaculinities.

What is happening in these private clubs, and how does one qualify for an invite?

In Clare Strand’s playful work Men Only Tower (2017), she presents 68 copies of the British softcore publication 'Men Only'.

The magazine that unashamedly claimed: ‘We don’t want women readers. We won’t have women readers.’

Strand’s decision to display the magazines in a vertical glass case, referencing the phallic form, speaks not only of exaggerated size with its clear reference to Trump's America but alludes to how women have historically been excluded from the corridors of power, and how that practice continues to prevail in our contemporary moment.

Exploding with psychosexual drama and tension, Aneta Bartos’ Family Portrait, 2015–18, alludes to the way portraiture is often a process of artifice and construction.

What began as the intention to document her father, a retired bodybuilder, before his body started ageing, quickly turned into a collaborative project: Bartos brings herself into the frame to unsettle the father–daughter dynamic.

In Apple for instance, Bartos’s father holds an apple while Bartos stares directly to the camera and by extension at the viewer, calling into question the biblical narrative of the fall of man.

Produced over nearly two decades, Masahisa Fukase’s moving series Family uses the backdrop of his family-run photography studio in Hokkaido, northern Japan to construct highly performative yet formal photographs of his family in which semi-clad young women often appear striking deliberately comedic or subversive poses. The women are routinely placed at the left edge of the group giving rise to uncomfortable tensions of hierarchy, equality and dominance.

In positioning the women as ‘extras’ or outsiders, or showing them striking ludicrous poses, the photographs recall pejorative visual tropes and culturally specific contexts – such as the historically patriarchal attitude towards women in Japan – and meditate on the overt ways in which women are still systematically subordinated to men.

Exploring the complexity of the black male
experience, this section presents artists who have consciously subverted expectations of race, gender and the white gaze by
reclaiming the power to fashion their own identities.

Samuel Fosso opened his photographic studio in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, at the tender age of thirteen. During the day Fosso ran a commercial studio, at night he created highly performative black-and-white self-portraits, adopting a series of male personas.

The pictures from that mid-70s period show the teenage Fosso in a variety of guises: wearing high-waisted flared trousers and aviator shades; stripped to the waist with his back to the lens in front of a painted urban backdrop; or dressed up in platform boots and tasselled trousers.

Ultimately, these carefully staged portraits enabled Fosso to assert his own presence, as he says: ‘When you look at my work, it’s my body that is looking at me. It’s my way of seeing.’

As the second-wave feminist movement gained momentum through the 1960s and ’70s, female activists worked to expose and critique the entrenched ideas about masculinity and to offer alternative perspectives on gender and representation. These artists make men their subject with the radical intention of subverting their power, calling into question the notion that men are active and women passive.

In her encyclopedic visual survey Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female and ‘Male Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, Marianne Wex analysed the differences between female and male body language by assembling hundreds of images culled from advertisements, reportage, fashion magazines, studio portraits and art history alongside photographs she took of people in the streets of Hamburg.

Men sit with their legs apart and feet outward; women sit with their knees and feet together. These differences in posture are, Wex concludes, products of a social conditioning that defines one sex as strong and the other as weak, perpetuating a hierarchical distinction between the sexes in the form of patterns of physical behaviour.

Ana Mendieta’s early series Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) documents a performance where she glued fragments of her fellow student Morty Sklar’s beard onto her own female face, highlighting the idea that binary gender classifications are social constructions that frame and overdetermine sexualities.

By hybridising her identity, Mendieta problematised those classifications, suggesting that so-called masculine identity as expressed throughfacial hair is nothing but artifice.