What, exactly, is masculinity?

Masc Off is our week dedicated to expressions of masculinity as a quality. Has there ever been a better time to ask the big questions? Like: What, exactly, is a man? What was masculinity, and what could it become? In this series, our contributors pull apart the tenuously constructed structure of masculinity to unearth what lies beneath the masc. 

Our era is marked by a particular nostalgia for male dominance. Certain expressions of masculinity are on the rise while others are policed—along with the actual rights of actual people—in the service of a single story, a rigid imposition of qualities and characteristics. And, often enough, a consolidation of power as aesthetic.

The photographs of these five artists are an antidote to a flattened expression of masculinity. Through their work and words, a more complex and varied picture begins to emerge. In soft sun-soaked color portraits, Clifford Prince King documents intimacy informed by his experiences as a queer black man. Anne Schwartz photographs their trans masc Brooklyn community in stunning and surreal black-and-white. Hannah Price, known for her portraits of the men who cat-called her in Philadelphia, shares tender new pictures that also emphasize the primacy of the gaze. One of Wynne Neilly’s striking photos of Elliot Page famously made the cover of TIME, and his broader work on queer and trans people speaks to expansive beauty and community. Of their ongoing project, Every Breath We Drew, begun in 2011, the portrait photographer Jess T. Dugan has said, “The people I was drawn to photograph embody a gentle kind of a masculinity, whether they are male or female, gay or straight.”

These insightful and close-looking photographers shared two images each to exemplify their recent work. Feeld spoke to them about inspiration and pursuits of happiness; their perspective on capturing gender expression; the relationship between looking and desire; and what masculinity means to them. 

CLIFFORD PRINCE KING

What does masculinity mean to you?

To me, masculinity is a mentality that I connect with, off and on, throughout my life. In my youth, my masculinity was often challenged: not being tough, crying or being told I was too sensitive. Now, I allow the masculine aspects of my authentic self to be displayed however they may be, without force or the need to affirm or prove something.

How do you understand the relationship between photography and gender expression?

Photography, specifically portraits, [is] typically striving to capture someone’s essence.

For me, I like to take queer cis men and arrange them (stance/body language) in “feminine”

poses whilst all else (clothes, appearance) remains masculine. I think I’ve been able to showcase that men naturally embody traits that are feminine, and vice versa. Overall [I hope I’m] normalizing gender fluidity.

Is there a particular image (yours or someone else's) that changed your understanding of masculinity?

I’d say the photographs of the Black sailors photographed at the Chelsea Piers in the early 70s by Alvin Baltrop. Recently, I was really inspired by Savanah Leaf’s film Earth Mama. As well as Samuel Fosso’s photos and set designs in the late 1970s. I suppose anything referencing a time period that isn’t current, but [which] says something about today, is interesting and inspires me.

Clifford Prince King is a New York based artist. King documents his intimate relationships in traditional, everyday settings that speak about his experiences as a queer black man. Within King's images are nods to the beyond. Shared offerings to the past manifest themselves in codes hidden in plain sight, known only to those who sit within a shared place of knowledge.

ANNE SCHWARTZ

How do ways of looking inform how you come to know a person? And/or what, to you, is the relationship between looking and desire?

You can look with scrutiny, look as a voyeur, look with envy, or look with compassion. You can look to understand, look to seduce, or look to love.

I believe you can look without desire and therefore take photographs without desire, but I would never deny the presence of desire in my photography.

Is there a particular image that changed your understanding of masculinity? What does happiness mean to you—related to photography/ways of seeing or otherwise?

In her seminal essay, “On Photography,” Susan Sontag asserts that taking photographs can both certify experience and “is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.” I’m happy when my shoots are experiences not limited in their sensorial potential and interpersonal connectedness by photography but enhanced by it.

What/who inspires you creatively right now?

Like it is for many people who live here, the 70s-90s downtown New York art scene is a forever inspiration for my work. The work of photographers like Mark Morrisroe, David Armstrong, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz (mostly his writing), Jimmy De Sana, Stephen Barker, Stanley Stellar, Alvin Baltrop, and many others. Vintage gay porn and physique magazines like Physique Pictorial, Sir G, and Straight to Hell are also points of departure for my work.

Right now I am inspired by the movement for Palestinian liberation.

Anne Schwartz is a portrait photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work seeks to continue the archival lineage of late 20th century queer and trans artists making work with friends and lovers in New York (and beyond), honoring the legacy of the first wave of HIV/AIDS. Anne’s interpretive approach concerns itself with complicating narratives of identity and power, spectator and subject, and resistance to what David Wojnarowicz refers to as “the pre-invented existence” or modalities of the mainstream.

HANNAH PRICE

What does masculinity mean to you?

Masculinity, just like femininity, is a word that has been defining gender and identity for centuries. The dictionary defines masculine as a characteristic of a man. The larger the man is the more strength they are expected to have, in our society. However, not all men are tall and muscular. And even a muscular man could be incapable of violence. Assumptions like these and many others are often overlooked, but deeply influence how we understand gender. 

How do ways of looking inform how you come to know a person? And/or what, to you, is the relationship between looking and desire?

Looking helps inform how you come to know a person—by noticing their gestures, expressions, and manners. When you are looking at a photograph of a person you look at how they hold themselves—are you gazing into their eyes, or are they looking at something else?

What does happiness mean to you—related to photography/ways of seeing or otherwise?

Related to ways of seeing, happiness is when your eyes are guided by shapes and lines, light and shade. Generally, when everything comes together and seems to fit naturally, like it’s supposed to be that way.

Raised in Fort Collins, Colorado, Hannah Price (b. 1986) is a photographic artist and filmmaker primarily interested in documenting relationships, race politics, perception, and misperception. Price is internationally known for her project City of Brotherly Love (2009-2012), a series of photographs of the men who catcalled her on the streets of Philadelphia. In 2014, Price graduated from the Yale School of Art MFA Photography program, receiving the Richard Benson Prize for excellence in photography. Over the past ten years, Price’s photos have been displayed in several cities across the United States, with a few residing in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Currently, she lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

WYNNE NEILLY

What does masculinity mean to you?

Masculinity has been a defining word for me for as long as I can remember. Even when I didn’t necessarily have the exact language for it, I can understand my experience of my identity as in line with a sense of masculinity (tomboy, butch). Masculinity has been both a space of comfort/alignment for me as a trans-masculine person, but also a space of fear and shame. I don’t know if I will ever have a straightforward answer to this question because I am continually understanding my masculine identity and the parts of me that define it.

A lot of my experience and relationship to masculinity means re-imagining and getting critical of the social constructs built around it. The older I get, the more I realize that my relationship to masculinity is unique to me, which affects how I define it. I don’t want to endorse every traditional ideal that was taught to me. I believe that my life’s work as a visual artist will live within this continual investigation of my relationship to my own masculinity, and the masculine identity within others. As a trans-masculine person, I think that there is a really incredible opportunity to re-define masculinity in a profound way through shifting experiences of body transformation and social perception.

How do you understand the relationship between photography and gender expression?

Photography has been such a valuable tool in my understanding of my own identity and gender expression. When I was in school studying photography (2008-2012), I started to explore portraiture as a way to learn more about the community of queer and trans people I was spending time with. I didn’t really have an understanding of what I was doing at the time, but I was using these portrait sessions as a way to better understand myself and find answers. Ultimately, I was finding parts of myself reflected back in the subjects I was photographing. Not only did this give me courage, and confidence in owning my trans identity, but it also gave me purpose in my work as an artist. I started to understand what it was that ignited my need to create.

In 2013 I began a series of self-portraits titled Female to “Male,” which consisted of weekly Polaroids documenting my physical appearance shifting as I began taking testosterone. The Polaroid itself is a 1/1 form of image making and represents my physical form suspended in time through weekly checkpoints. In the first year of documenting myself in this way, it’s very noticeable how things can change rapidly from week to week. I liked the idea of having full awareness of when puberty would begin, and having these relics that represent a unique version of myself that will never exist again.

Separate from that specific example, I think my approach to portraiture overall is this capsule of expression and relational intimacy that informs my understanding of my own identity and I would imagine has a similar effect on the sitter as well.

What does happiness mean to you—related to photography/ways of seeing or otherwise?

I am realizing more and more that happiness is not something you simply arrive at after a set of actions or a length of time, it’s something that is created with consistency in the form of daily practice. [The] key word here being CREATE.

Happiness requires a level of presence that can often be very challenging to tap into. It’s been helpful to me to see the relationship between the presence happiness requires, and the presence that image making requires. You have to be very aware of your surroundings, your relationships, the way the light hits something at a certain time of day, the energy that a person gives you, the fulfillment you feel when you know you’ve created something beautiful.

Wynne Neilly is a Canadian, queer and trans-identified visual artist and award winning photographer who is currently living and working out of Toronto. He is most known for his monumental cover of TIME Magazine featuring Elliot Page in 2021 along with receiving recognition for winning Scotia Bank's New Generation Photography Award in 2023. His artistic practice, most often, is an investigation into engaging with the queer and trans identity, both on an individual level and relationally within the community. Wynne’s work aims to open up a conversation around how we read and interpret intimacy between queer and trans bodies, both in the subject matter itself and from his gaze as the image maker. The content of his work seeks to reveal and support the notion of individuality and non-normative presentations of gender identity as political liberation and personal healing.

JESS T. DUGAN

 How do you understand the relationship between photography and gender expression?

I have always used photography to understand myself and my place in the world. Growing up, I didn’t see images of people who looked like me in mainstream media, and I sought representations I could relate to in photography books. Discovering photographs of butch and transmasculine people was incredibly important to me as a young person, and my career has been infused with a strong belief in the importance of representation.

My work centers around the power of seeing and being seen, which feels particularly powerful for those of us whose identities are marginalized. Through my photographs, I aim to create space for a subject to fully be themselves and to be viewed through a lens of beauty, reverence, and celebration.

Is there a particular image (yours or someone else's) that changed your understanding of masculinity?

I had powerful early experiences with the work of Catherine Opie and Del LaGrace Volcano; their photographs certainly affected how I thought about female masculinity, and butch and trans representations of masculinity. Also—on a slightly more mainstream note—my mom came out as a lesbian when I was young and was really into k.d. lang. I somehow got this k.d. lang book when I was 11 or 12, and there was an Herb Ritts’ photograph in it of Cindy Crawford straddling k.d. in a barber chair. I hadn’t thought about that photograph in decades, but it recently resurfaced in my consciousness as an early, significant representation of queer/butch masculinity, one that was also infused with sexuality and desire.

How do ways of looking inform how you come to know a person? And/or what, to you, is the relationship between looking and desire?

At its core, my work is all about desire. There is a desire to be with someone, to be near someone, to be like someone, to understand someone, to be seen by someone…my work is often about a kind of reflection that happens between me and my subject. What kind of magic will happen when we come together, meeting somewhere in the middle? How will they look at me, and what will I see when I look at them? I choose people to photograph because I feel an energetic connection with them or an attraction to them. I sometimes mine my own psychology in order to understand where this pull comes from, but it’s like any other attraction: you either feel it or you don’t.

Photography allows me to spend time with another person in an intimate way; it is this facilitation of intimacy that I find most moving about the entire process. I think there is something vulnerable about saying to another person, “I think you’re beautiful; I’d like to make pictures of you,” and for them to respond by allowing themselves to be seen, allow[ing] me to take my time looking at them, closely and carefully. Also, as queer people, we have often had to actively name and assert our own desires. The most powerful way for me to do that is through my photography.

Jess T. Dugan is an artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of personhood, relationships, desire, love, and family. While their practice is centered around photography, it also includes writing, video, sound, drawing, and installation. Their work is informed by their own life experiences, including their identity as a queer and nonbinary person, and reflects a deep belief in the importance of representation and the transformative power of storytelling. Their work is regularly exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of over 60 museums.