While photographing at an Edenic watering hole in upstate New York for my long term series ‘Down by the Hudson’, I noticed that many men wrestle with their friends as soon as they get into the water. I am fascinated by how this sort of playful wrestling is a through-line in how men engage with their friends in this space. It’s how they relate to each other. It feels affectionate, platonic, playful, and vulnerable.
One photograph from ‘Down by the Hudson’ in particular has stayed with me. It’s a photograph of Bode and Owen wrestling in the water, their bodies pushed up against each - you can really feel the tension of one body extending its force into the other body and you can feel how those bodies interact with the creek, how the water moves around them. I exhibited that work at ROSEGALLERY in LA last year in a solo exhibition of prints from 'Down by the Hudson’. In a quiet moment during the installation, I was walking through the exhibition with Rose Shoshana and she told me that the photograph of Bode and Owen was going to stay in my head, that I was going to be working through the ideas in it for some time. And Rose was right - I have continued to look at men with tenderness as a way of complicating societal conceptions of masculinity, particularly heterosexual masculinity. I’ve been looking into how to make a picture that furthers this exploration of the complex ways in which men relate to each other and express themselves, and I’ve been asking myself how I can build up a sense of poetry and tension in that exploration, and, how to convey all of these questions with work that is sensual and strong at the same time.
It became a bit of a puzzle in my head: When a photograph looks soft - because of its forms, because of its light and its tonality, but it shows men that present themselves as tough (although there is tenderness suggested beneath that), then perhaps that’s a powerful way of questioning what it means to be a man today, to inhabit those contradictions between toughness and tenderness.
