This is Dick Stark, a student Kundzicz met when he lived for a time near Columbia University in New York City. Dick is best known for posing with some of his college buddies in jockstraps for a very memorable photo series believed to have been made in the C.U. gym locker room. Those photos were far and away the most popular jock photos ever on my old tumblr. I may need to repeat.
Dick Stark never posed full-frontal nude - or, if ever he did, no pictures are extant. A partial copy of a contract survives, dated March 20, 1958, which is thought to be his contract with Walter Kundzicz, and on which is written "born 1940" - which, without running out of fingers and toes, makes his age 18 at that time.
ReplyDeleteStark was always pictured in posing pouches and a variety of briefs and, as I mentioned in my comment on AMG's regular use of the Jockey Skants briefs - introduced in 1958 - on the picture of Jerry Sullivan, it is interesting to note that one set of Stark in a very sheer pair of briefs which, under the studio lighting, left nothing to the imagination, was published possibly several years after the shoot, when the more relaxed atmosphere of the 1960s would not have left Kundzicz open to prosecution.
Being on the other side of the pond, I was very aware - mostly by the hairstyles which had since dramatically changed - that many of the images in the men's "physique" magazines of the late 1960s were effectively recycled images. There was a major public debate in Britain in the late 1950s over American comics and "pulp fiction" being sold - a debate that got as far as parliament, with the uncle of one of my school friends being a Conservative Party member of parliament who opposed their import - but it came to nothing, and by the late 1960s, I was, with the able connivance of a sympathetic newsagent, able to buy and smuggle home many of these magazines, which had images in them, some at least a decade old. Dick Stark in his see-through briefs was amongst them.
I have read that when it came to the changing room shoot at CU, Stark's entourage was far from reticent about joining in. It was in the days before identity politics had taken over and the bodybuilding world had yet finally to separate itself from emergent gay porn... and if you had it, you could flaunt it - and they did.
Thanks for your very interesting perspective on this!
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