Marco

Other kids my age have different heroes.

Rock stars, sports stars, movie stars, even - in the case of many of my gay friends - porn stars.

But not me.

Most of my friends have never heard of my particular idols.

Dave Martin, Al Urban, Pat Milo, Bob Mizer...

...though one or two of them might have heard of the last on my list of all time greats - Bruce Weber.

You see, they're all great photographers - ones who have specialised in portraying the male body.

And, as well as being a gay boy myself, I'm just nuts about photography.

Right now I'm taking a college course that I hope will get me a successful career in the profession

And these studies of my friend Marco are going to be a major part of my portfolio.

Of course, if I'd submitted work like this to my professors years ago they'd not only have thrown me off the course but would have called in the cops too (although from the number of faculty members I've spotted in gay bars, they'd probably, a the same time, have squirreled away the best pictures for their priivate collections).

But everyone's so politically correct thse days that you could probably submit pictures of your grandma being stuffed by a horse - and still get away with claiming that it was an artistically valid deconstructive critique of modern consumerism's post-Marxist exploitation of our fellow species.

Don'tcha just love modern art?

My technique is far more in-your-face.

Put bluntly, my artistic philosophy is to juxtapose a model with a deliberately spare setting in order to signify the inherent contradiction of a man's apparent bodily strength with his essential vulnerability in the morally bleak contemporary urban environment.

Makes good sense, huh?

So when you look at these pictures of Marco, please remember that you've got to raise your intellect and perceptional instincts onto a far higher plane than with most photographs on the HMBoys.com site.

This is Art.

With a capital "A".

Study and enjoy!

Here I use Marco to indicate Mankind's false sense of security and fragile optimism in a contemporary urban setting.

I think that works well, don't you?

Of course, no critique of early 21st century life would be complete without some sort of withering artistic commentary on contemporary fads and fashions. In this instance I used modern man's preoccupation with the world of the gym and overt physical appearances to suggest an essential moral vacuum at the heart of his value system.

(Note, too, how the closed blinds symbolise our contemporary withdrawal from genuine social interaction.)

Again, I think this picture works on several levels to make its points, don't you?

Take a minute or two to work it out.

Humanity's vulnerability is once again the theme of the next two pictures.

For me, as for many other great artists in the past, the penis embodies an inherent contradiction.

On the one hand it is the universal instrument of masculinity, power and domination.

While on the other it can be soft, sensitive and intensely vulnerable.

I think I make that point quite well in these two studies, though, on reflection, maybe a monochrone medium would have made the point more effectively.

I'm specially proud, I have to tell you, of the next two studies - and my model Marco obviously appreciated the particular artistic point I was making with them because he really loved taking up the necessary pose.

You won't, of course, need me to tell you that the idea behind these two pictures is to demonstrate that our so called "inner depth" of understanding masks a dark hole of ignorance and misunderstanding about the real meaning of the evloution of Western thought.

Schoppenhauer makes a similar point in his writings - but I think my photographs do so with more economy and layers of meaning.

I hope you appreciate them.

Finally, let me present you with a study of which I'm exceptionally proud.

As you'll see next week, I've produced almost 150 images of Marco for my portfolio - but I think this one says it all.

And, as you are all so obviously on my mental and artistic wavelength, I don't, for once, think that any words of explanation are necessary.

I'll just let the picture say it all. browse around these guys

In this next picture I again wanted to capture a man's vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of nature - even while he displays an unwarranted sense of eternal optimism. To put it another way, the hollowness of contemporary "civilisation" is all too apparent here.

But I'm not quite so sure about its moral basis - if, of course, we accept that there is still any moral basis to Art at all (I wrote a great paper on that last semester - I'll dig it out for you if you like).

What do you think?