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Book Review: Picturing Men
May. 19th, 2022 08:48 amAfter my generally negative response to John Ibson’s The Mourning After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men, I am baffled to report that his earlier book Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography... is actually good?
Picturing Men is a collection of photographs (both studio portraits and snapshots) of men together between 1850 and 1950, either in pairs or larger groupings. The photographs show that up through the 1910s, many men felt perfectly comfortable displaying physical affection in front of the camera: slinging their arms around each other, lying on top of each other, sitting on each other’s laps, kissing each other’s cheeks.
Ibson notes that many of these photos are now sold as “gay interest,” and in a way that’s accurate - they certainly are of “gay interest” today! - but, he points out, when these photos were taken there was nothing queer about this behavior in any sense of the word. Going to a professional photographer’s studio to get a professional photograph taken where you sit in your friend’s lap was 100% normal, masculine behavior, a common, fun activity that lots of men took part in. They often got the photos printed as postcards and sent them to other friends to show off what a good time they were having.
(And of course this means that guys who WERE boyfriends could get snuggly professional photographs taken too. Ibson has one photograph from 1920 of two guys leaning together so their heads touch, prominently sporting pansies in their buttonholes, and I think the slang term pansy was already common at that point, so it’s hard not to feel that this is a wink-wink nudge-nudge… although, again, we just can’t know.)
But over the 1910s and 1920s, these photographs transformed. Men got fewer and fewer studio portraits taken together. (It’s worth noting that snapshots had been around and inexpensive for at least twenty years at this point; this change is not merely the result of changing technology.) They also began to put more space between themselves in snapshots.
There’s a particularly fascinating chapter about the metamorphosis in team sports photographs. Before the 1910s, these photos tended to have an aesthetic that you might call “puppy pile”: sometimes the team members are literally lying on top of each other, or all crowded together with their arms around each other. Over the 1910s and 20s, the pictures literally “straighten up,” till the team members are standing in rows keeping their hands to themselves, as teams generally do in official photographs today.
During World War II, there was a brief resurgence of affectionate studio portraits of men - army buddies hugging each other etc. But more or less immediately after the war, the lid clamped down hard and did not lift again. I know I mentioned this in my review of The Mourning After, but again, I just can’t get over the cruelty of the cultural switcheroo from “Invest super hard in your relationship with your buddies! Here is an official government issued Buddy Book with a special page for My Favorite Buddy!” to “Why would any normal heterosexual man ever have strong feelings about another man or want to touch another man EVER, ew.”
During the Korean War, a mere five years later, there were scarcely any studio portraits of buddies. Even the snapshots often show the same stiffness that had become common in pictures of civilian men. And there were also simply fewer pictures of men together. This entire business of taking pictures with other men had begun to seem just a little gay.
By the Vietnam War, the idea of men displaying physical affection was so alien to American soldiers that they were appalled to see South Vietnamese soldiers going for walks with their buddies hand-in-hand. The Americans thought that the South Vietnamese army was riddled with homosexuals, and it contributed significantly to their belief that ARVN wasn’t much of a fighting force.
Picturing Men is a collection of photographs (both studio portraits and snapshots) of men together between 1850 and 1950, either in pairs or larger groupings. The photographs show that up through the 1910s, many men felt perfectly comfortable displaying physical affection in front of the camera: slinging their arms around each other, lying on top of each other, sitting on each other’s laps, kissing each other’s cheeks.
Ibson notes that many of these photos are now sold as “gay interest,” and in a way that’s accurate - they certainly are of “gay interest” today! - but, he points out, when these photos were taken there was nothing queer about this behavior in any sense of the word. Going to a professional photographer’s studio to get a professional photograph taken where you sit in your friend’s lap was 100% normal, masculine behavior, a common, fun activity that lots of men took part in. They often got the photos printed as postcards and sent them to other friends to show off what a good time they were having.
(And of course this means that guys who WERE boyfriends could get snuggly professional photographs taken too. Ibson has one photograph from 1920 of two guys leaning together so their heads touch, prominently sporting pansies in their buttonholes, and I think the slang term pansy was already common at that point, so it’s hard not to feel that this is a wink-wink nudge-nudge… although, again, we just can’t know.)
But over the 1910s and 1920s, these photographs transformed. Men got fewer and fewer studio portraits taken together. (It’s worth noting that snapshots had been around and inexpensive for at least twenty years at this point; this change is not merely the result of changing technology.) They also began to put more space between themselves in snapshots.
There’s a particularly fascinating chapter about the metamorphosis in team sports photographs. Before the 1910s, these photos tended to have an aesthetic that you might call “puppy pile”: sometimes the team members are literally lying on top of each other, or all crowded together with their arms around each other. Over the 1910s and 20s, the pictures literally “straighten up,” till the team members are standing in rows keeping their hands to themselves, as teams generally do in official photographs today.
During World War II, there was a brief resurgence of affectionate studio portraits of men - army buddies hugging each other etc. But more or less immediately after the war, the lid clamped down hard and did not lift again. I know I mentioned this in my review of The Mourning After, but again, I just can’t get over the cruelty of the cultural switcheroo from “Invest super hard in your relationship with your buddies! Here is an official government issued Buddy Book with a special page for My Favorite Buddy!” to “Why would any normal heterosexual man ever have strong feelings about another man or want to touch another man EVER, ew.”
During the Korean War, a mere five years later, there were scarcely any studio portraits of buddies. Even the snapshots often show the same stiffness that had become common in pictures of civilian men. And there were also simply fewer pictures of men together. This entire business of taking pictures with other men had begun to seem just a little gay.
By the Vietnam War, the idea of men displaying physical affection was so alien to American soldiers that they were appalled to see South Vietnamese soldiers going for walks with their buddies hand-in-hand. The Americans thought that the South Vietnamese army was riddled with homosexuals, and it contributed significantly to their belief that ARVN wasn’t much of a fighting force.
