There is not much dialogue on beauty in popular
culture. There is a lot of marketing, and branding which we adopt styles and
fashions from, but there is little discussion of actual beauty. When it comes
to the idea of male beauty there is even less so, and the representations
through the usual channels tend to fall into one of two depicted types. On the
one hand you have the very skinny but ultimately de-sexed image, a paedophilic
representation held up as what we should be. Girly men from which there is
little to fear, they are girlfriends in another guise. Even people who would
speak out against this type of imaging for women such as Germaine Greer fall
into the guilty category for selling us this view. Greer’s photo-book Boy makes
for uneasy viewing. She argues that unless women allow themselves to be open in
their views of boys and young men they are losing out. The Guardian review lets
her off the hook easily saying that the book is
‘giving
us more refined and interesting ways to interpret the complexity of those
feelings that are already being expressed.’
The other view which is peddled of
course is the he-man ‘muscle’ type, a more traditional representation, perhaps
a bloated extension of the golden ratio ideal, but ramped up so that really we
could be at a farmer’s auction choosing bulls for breeding stock. You will
often hear women say, when talking about their tastes in men things like ‘He
has to be tall,’ or ‘He has to have no body hair.’ This is part of the auction
house mentality. Imagine taking the tall thing to any kind of logical
conclusion; tallness as the only virtue of male value.
There is also a third representation
of the male in popular media which is of the useless male, fat, or handsome but
unable to cope, or not in touch with emotion, or faulted in so many other ways.
What you rarely will see is a decent man lit with the light of his own beauty.
Of course all that has been said so far applies to representations of women as
well, no one comes out of this well unfortunately.
While we may not want to believe in
the images touted at us, they soak into our views of the world. Women and men
talk disparagingly about each other. In reaction to the end of the paragraph
above someone is bound to reply that there are no decent men. The newspapers
both middle-class and low brow, even Radio 4 and things we may consider to
be better media, buy into these myths; and so it is that we don’t see each
other. We walk around with images burnt into us which we believe be to our own
tastes and desires. They drive us to stupidity, hurtfulness and stop us from actually
meeting. We end up with a world of sexual imagery, and no sexuality or
sensuality. We end up with sexism, and worse still, we feel ugly about
ourselves.
When Victoria from Wild Women’sPress got in touch with me to ask if I would consider being photographed for
her calendar project, I was very taken a aback. Her outright approach was quite
simply ‘I find you very beautiful, and would you be willing to share your
beauty through our project to help raise funds for a diabetes charity.’ How can you say no to such an approach?
I have never thought of the word beauty when it came to myself. I have certain
vanities as we all do, but beauty? I am not what you see on television, I am
not what you will find in any media. I am certainly not tall or young or
skinny, I am not a bull, nor am I stupid, incapable or out of touch with my
emotions. Perhaps even worse I feel a lot, love deeply, think a lot, and I don’t
believe in the battle of the sexes, but love the differences between us. I love
being a man. I am brown-skinned and have a hairy body. I am sexual and sensual
and am endlessly curious about humanity and our world; I don’t fit into the
pictures we are fed of men at all. Nor am I the exception, most of my male
friends are intelligent, feeling, people in their own ways, and they also fall out
of the media represented body norms.
I have always known that body and
soul are part of each other, not separate as taught at the lower ends of the
Abrahamic or the ascetic faiths. The genuine artist, writer, photographer tries
to see without the layers of secondhand thought getting in the way. My own work
has always been based on the principle of finding beauty where others don’t see
it and returning it to the light, so for me there was nothing to fear in being
photographed naked at all.
I am in Leonie Hampton’s studio. There
is a pool of sunlight on the white floor. At first my nerves come up when the moment comes to remove my robe. Leonie is funny and quiet; her gaze is
very loving. Her assistant Claire is busy making a pot of tea. Removing my
coverings is a bit like plunging into water, just an intake of breath and then
I am naked. Leonie invites me to sit in the pool of light. The first shots, I
don’t know what to do with my hands. I look at the camera think about how she
is using it, a simple 50mm lens, everything set to manual; she is easy with her
working tools. We move around and the most important thing in the room is the
artist’s love for her subject; she lets me in so I let her in. We stop for tea
and do not discuss the images at all. Back into the shoot - the space is cut
out from the rest of the world. Leonie’s music system spins out Roy Harper’s
Stormcock and Eno’s Another Green World, and I lie down in the light and let
body and soul be. We all fall to silence for what feels like hours.
Not one person in the world really
knows what they look like, as we are the sum of our reflections in each other’s
eyes. To be found beautiful for who you are, to be gazed upon with openness and
basic human love, which is the truth behind all great art. To be held in a
perfect moment of intimacy, to be truly naked like this is humbling. Not just
to be without clothes, but to be; how wonderful a chance this is in a life.
© John Siddique 2012
A PDF of this short essay is available here.
Note: If you wish to quote from, or syndicate this essay please
get in touch first.
~
..and as a thank you for reading, here is Natasha Khan/Bat For Lashes taking a god-awful thing by Rhianna, spotting the good song hidden in the mess and making something wondrous with it.
