The name Bob Mizer may not mean anything to you, but his story is the stuff of legend. In 1945, the 24-year-old spent his time lurking around California’s Muscle Beach, convincing its bulky, bikini-clad denizens to participate in provocative photoshoots and short films, wearing tiny posing straps (an early ancestor of the g-string, each sewn by Mizer’s surprisingly supportive mother out of tube socks and thin strips of elastic.)
Related: Bel Ami Helps Preserve The Beefcake Legacy Of Athletic Model Guild’s Bob Mizer
That same year, Mizer opened the Athletic Model Guild as a means to market his photography, inadvertently inventing “physique photography” as we now know it. Although bodybuilders had certainly been photographed before, it had never been with such a slyly seductive lens aimed at a gay audience. In 1951, he launched Physique Pictorial, which was the very first gay magazine to ever be released to the public worldwide.
Related: PHOTOS: First American Museum Exhibit Of Bob Mizer And Tom Of Finland’s Physique Art
As The New Yorker reports in its excellent piece on the late Mizer, he’d “produced more than a million negatives and some three thousand hours of film and video” by the time of his death in 1993. He previously highlighted some of his strongest work 1968’s “Thousand Model Directory,” which Taschen Books is now re-releasing in two volumes that will instantaneously transform any coffee-table into a beefcake table.
Related: Stroke Artwork Goes From Under The Mattress To Out In The Open
The original copies were little 98-page books and the images were so tiny — 12 to a page — that they were as infuriating as they were seductive. Fortunately, Taschen used the original 4 x 5 negatives to present these male specimen in all their glory — or at least as much glory as was legal in 1968.
You can get order both volumes for $99, and the collection includes an hour-long DVD featuring 18 of his erotic black-and-white films, which range from simple posedowns to campy “sword and sandal” male burlesque.
Here are some highlights from the collection:
MarionPaige
not sure why this is suddenly news, and,
take note,
Queerty, a GAY blog, is quoting The New Yorker on a story about Bob Mizer. But then, Mizer could probably only make Towleroad if Mizer had been gay bashed.
the movie “Beefcake” tells the Mizer story.
ErikO
I’m not sure why this is news either? He’s been dead since 1992 and was old news even then.
underboy
it is news. a major landmark gay artist with an article in a major straight magazine, as well as a huge book by Taschen about him and his work is about to be released.
Kangol
@underboy: Bingo!
uktnla
@underboy: New Yorker is a straight magazine???
MarionPaige
@underboy: ” … it is news. a major landmark gay artist with an article in a major straight magazine.”
in re “does a falling tree make a sound if there is no one there to hear it”, it appears that,
with some Gays,
nothing Gay is really significant unless it is recognized by straight / mainstream media.
There are many examples of “communities” in American that manage to exist and thrive without mainstream validation, sadly, GAY isn’t one of them. It’s like that gay porn director who bragged about PageSix mentioning one of his videos. AS IF, people reading PageSix were going to run out and buy gay porn because of something in PageSix.
There is or was a gay adult membership site, Athletic Model Guild, about Mizer’s work that you can join that, I’m guessing, has had more (more adult) fare than any pending Book.
Tobi
@MarionPaige: If you’re after the history, visit the foundation at http://bobmizer.org/
mujerado
@MarionPaige: – The mention in the New Yorker was tangential to the release of art book collections of Mizer from Taschen. If you don’t know Taschen, they have a website. They’re a major international publisher of art books. That was the news, not the mention in the New Yorker.
NCSilverBear
Fascinating. I remember when I was still an adolescent “finding” an envelope containing small glossies and several small magazines with order forms with Mizer’s models, although of course, at the time I did not know the photographer was Mizer. And I kept them hidden. They greatly aroused me. I think it was then that I began to come to know about my sexuality. At the time and my puritanical surroundings, I did not know the term gay, or even homosexual. That was a long time ago, in a different world. But, I have fond memories of that discovery and “secret”.