Masculinities: Photography and Film from the 1960s to Now: Liberation through Photography

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Through the medium of film and photography, this major exhibition considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructedfrom the 1960s to the present day. Examining depictions of masculinity from behind the lens, the exhibition brings together the work of over 50 international artists, photographers and filmmakers includingLaurie Anderson,Sunil Gupta,Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac JulienandCatherine Opie. In the wake of #MeToo, the image of masculinity has come into sharper focus, with ideas of toxic and fragile masculinity permeating today’s society. This exhibition charts the often complex and sometimes contradictory representations of masculinities, and how they have developed and evolved over time. Touching on themes including power, patriarchy, queer identity, racial politics, female perceptions of men, hypermasculinestereotypes, tendernessand the family, the exhibition examines the critical role photography and film have played in the way masculinitiesareimagined and understood in contemporary culture. This autumn, the Gropius Bau presents Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, a comprehensive group exhibition that explores the diverse ways in which masculinity is experienced, performed and socially constructed through photography and film from the 1960s to the present day.

If you’re photographing yourself or someone else - be sure to make the other person feels comfortable and safe and that you have their consent. But if these sections include some hard-hitting images, they also include moments of humour, especially in the video art that represents each chapter. Richard Mosse’s film shot at Harvard, Fraternity (2007), shows 10 men screaming for as long as they can to win a keg of beer – screaming until they’re red in the face, and their eyes are bulging. Knut Åsdam’s video, Untitled: Pissing (1995), meanwhile, zooms in on a crotch which proves leaky instead of virile – suggesting that synonym for failed masculinity, the bed-wetter. “I didn’t want it to be a show that men came to and found themselves alienated from, or self-loathing,” says Pardo. “The show is full of humour, and it’s playful. In defiance of the prejudice and legal constraints against homosexuality over the last century in Europe, the United States and beyond, the works presented in the forth chapter, Queering Masculinity, highlight how artists from the 1960s onwards have forged a new politically-charged queer aesthetic. The first British retrospective of Sunil Gupta’s work brings together material from across his long and varied career, from the scenes of everyday gay life in New York that he chronicled for his breakthrough series, Christopher Street , in 1976, to 2008’s elaborately constructed and highly symbolic vignettes, The New Pre-Raphaelites. “What does it mean to be a gay Indian man?” he has said of his photography. “This is the question that follows me around everywhere I go.” Read more. 4 Photoworks festival 2020 Your object can be as serious or playful as you want it to be - perhaps you want to poke fun at the very concept of masculinity?Homosociality Typically non-romantic and/or non-sexual same-sex relationships and social groupings – may sometimes include elements of homoeroticism, as they are frequently interdependent phenomena. Clear a bit of space and make sure that you can be by yourself and move safely for 15 minutes without being interrupted. Maybe close the door and/or put the phone aside. Make this practice work for you – if you need to adapt or transform something please do it, making sure you take from it the most you can. There is no right or wrong way, only your own fun way; last thing, be loving and caring mentally and physically, don’t hurt yourself. Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Gropius Bau, states: “Today, common perceptions of what it means to be or to become a man are increasingly questioned, especially for younger generations, who are confronted with these questions in a completely different way. The exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography offers a nuanced examination of masculinities in all their facets and shades. The works by over 50 international artists on view in the exhibition build a bridge from classical images of masculinity to gender-fluid identities, thus doing justice to a complex reality.” dominant position. The term was coined in the 1980s by the scholar R. W. Connell, drawing on the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony.

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography explores the diverse ways masculinity has been experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed in photography and film from the 1960s to the present day. But there are revelations alongside these familiar classics. German artist Marianne Wex’s comical cuttings archive observes, among much else, the ubiquity of manspreading in 1977. Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase’s time-lapse portraits of himself with his ageing father are a magnificent memorial to paternal love. And Larry Sultan’s tender images of his dad trying to fix the vacuum cleaner, practising his golf swing, or standing uselessly by the empty pool in California, seem to reverse the roles, so that the son becomes anxious parent to the father. Barbican Art Gallery reopens Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, a major group exhibition that explores how masculinity is experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed as expressed and documented through photography and film from the 1960s to the present day. Daniel Regan is a photographic artist whose work focuses on complex emotional experiences, often using his own lived experience of mental health difficulties as the stimulus. He’s interested in how we use photography as a way to process life’s experiences and can find a deeper understanding of who we are through photographs.Cosima Cobley Carr is a Barbican Young Creatives Alumni and an interdisciplinary artist, working in moving-image, collage and sound. Across different media, Cosi uses a collage method, bringing diverse elements from found and archival sources together with analogue and digitally created elements. Through their practice, Cosi explores issues related to social understanding, language-use and psychotherapy. Rebekka Yallop is an artist and writer based in London who works with moving image and text, often exploring queer themes. They were part of the Barbican’s Young Visual Arts group in 2019 and is currently one of Chisenhale Studios’ 2020 Into the Wild artists. They continue to make work, most recently a collaborative queer fiction zine.

We are currently missing a lot of things. Everything from meeting friends for coffee to half price Mondays at the cinema seems like a distant memory. Living in London, there’s nothing we miss more than the wealth of culture we used to take for granted. We asked curator and archivist Cyana Madsen to talk about one of her favourite recent exhibitions. Examining increasingly fluid notions of masculinity over the past six decades, this book offers a culturally diverse collection of work from some of the world's most celebrated photographers. Bringing a splash of colour to what has otherwise been a dull, grey year, the Swedish-Spanish architectural duo of Space Popular injected a bolt of supercharged visual joy into 2020. An exhibition at the RIBA on the history of style was sadly cut short, but was then brilliantly reinvented as an immersive virtual environment, where you could browse the show online as a computer game avatar. Meanwhile, the pair demonstrated their skills beyond the virtual with the completion of a dazzling new house in Spain that saw wafer-thin terracotta tile vaults suspended inside a bright-green steel frame. We’re in for a treat when they start to build big. Read more. 4 Stealing from the Saracens by Diana Darke In contrast to the conventions of the traditional family portrait, the artists gathered in the third chapter, Too close to Home: Family and Fatherhood, set out to record the “messiness” of life, reflecting on misogyny, violence, sexuality, mortality, intimacy and unfolding family dramas, presenting a more complex and not always comfortable vision of fatherhood and masculinity.Fetishisation To turn the subject into a fetish, sexually or otherwise. Fetishisation in terms of gender and desire frequently occurs in conjunction with objectification and power. Men and women of colour are frequently fetishised by white people, in society and in artistic practice, through different stereotypes and limitations. Trans and disabled people are also subject to fetishisation, particularly in bodily terms. Kobena Mercer’s critical essay on Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘Reading Radical Fetishism’, 1 and David Henry Hwang’s play and afterword to M. Butterfly (1988) both explore the notion of fetishisation. This is really interesting, man against bull, and yet what she’s photographing isn’t the matadors who work solo in the ring,” says Pardo. “She photographed the Portuguese bullfighters, who work in a group of eight. It’s about their own precarity, their own vulnerability in this, the fact that they need to work together.”