Some photographers seem to see things the rest of us don’t; that is until they capture them on film and then share it with the rest of us. Robert Vano is an artist of this caliber. He photographs landscapes, cityscapes, still life, portraits and does fashion shoots, but holds a special love for photographing the nude male. There must be a special place in his heart for this work, attested to by the vibrancy his camera brings to his subjects. I found it difficult to decide on which ones to post.
Born to Hungarian parents in the eastern Slovak town of Nové Zámky in 1948, Vano left his homeland before his 20th birthday, emigrating to the United States via Italy. He stayed in the States for almost three decades, starting out as a stylist for the fashion industry, then working as an assistant to big names in fashion photography before striking out on his own in the 1980s, shooting for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Elle.
Vano went to Prague in 1995 with the intention of staying for a year, he says, and has remained there ever since. After the hustle of working in the fast-paced, competitive fashion world of New York, Vano says he enjoyed the easier lifestyle in the Czech Republic. Even while holding jobs as creative director of the Czech version of Elle from 1996 to 2003 and then as art director at Czechoslovak Models since 2004, he has been able to slow down and find more time for his own creative work.
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So you’ve recognized the fact you’re attracted to men. Is that something you regret? If you walked into a French Quarter voodoo shop in New Orleans and found, among the spider eggs, fly wings, and toad stools, a magic potion that would make you 100% straight, would you grab it up and drink it as fast as you could?
How many gay or bisexual men have asked themselves this question? I bet 99% of them. What if a pill would do it, would you swallow two or three and then stare at yourself in the mirror, waiting for the change, wondering what you will look like straight? Or perhaps you find out about a tribal dance practiced by young warriors in Kenya that makes real men out of boys; would you put on a loincloth, take up a spear and give it hell around a backyard bonfire come the next full moon? Given the circumstances gay and bisexual men face in our misguided society, it’s little wonder if some of them would.
But when you get under the surface, below the lifetime of negative self-images and male identity questions, all that history that has glommed together to comprise your uniqueness, would you really want to give up one of the most vivid colors in your rainbow? You’ve finally gotten past all those gender-identity issues and have learned how to let your thoughts blossom without self-imposed limits–would you really want to force all that vital roundness back into such a small square hole?
Your liberated sexuality defines far more than the shape of the human body that attracts you, it’s interrelated with other facets of your persona. It’s likely to make people perceive you as interesting, whether they know about your sexuality or not. It plays a role in the books you chose to read, the movies you choose to see, the places you choose to travel to, the friends you choose. Without it, you may not even be interested in books, or you may find yourself lined up with the masses at the next college coed exploitation movie. You might even identify with those guys in TV beer commercials, heaven forbid.
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If there are artists that present day artists aspire to emulate, Henry Scott Tuke would be one of them.
Born in York, England in 1858, he died at age seventy in 1929.
In 1874 Tuke’s family moved to London, where he enrolled in the Slade School of Art. After graduating he traveled to Italy in 1880 , and from 1881 to 1883 he lived in Paris, where he studied with the French history painter Jean-Paul Laurens and met the American painter John Singer Sargent (who was also a painter of male nudes, although this fact was little known in his lifetime).
His motivation to paint teenage boys is unknown. For me the images are reminiscent of my own youth, those carefree, innocent days of exploring the world around us, uninhibited by self-imposed shame and the dictates of moral autocrats. Although Tuke’s paintings of nude youths undoubtedly appealed to those gay men who found adolescents attractive, they are never explicitly sexual. The models’ genitals are almost never shown, they are almost never in physical contact with each other, and there is never any suggestion of overt sexuality.
During the 1880s Tuke also met Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers, most of them homosexual (then usually called Uranian) who celebrated the adolescent male. He wrote a “sonnet to youth” which was published anonymously in The Artist, and also contributed an essay to The Studio.
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