For whatever reason, posing strap and trunk photos by Lyle Frisby are a relatively low proportion of his extant work. (Fred Kovert was another example, and he also had a tragic personal story.) Hank Evans worked for several photographers and seems to have had no qualms about posing frontally nude, but none of his solo shots by Lyle are such. We do, however, have a group of duos he did with Ed Haley, and I'll post one of those later in today's series. Meanwhile, he looks good in undies.
Posing trunks were very large in the 1950s to conform to the Zeitgeist of the time which demanded modesty. However, men's underwear could be very racy and increasingly brief. Note the very narrow, small leg seams and lack of front panel in these briefs, which would have put them very much in the racy category as the cut is very high over the buttocks. Mr Frisby captures great movement in this image but the briefs clearly veer it to the erotic. This would have been understood to be a deliberately provocative, homo-erotic image for the time. It still is today for those with an appreciation of less being more.
ReplyDeleteEverything you say makes sense, especially the part about being deliberately provocative. This is the same guy who appears later today as Hank Prater. Did I look at the faces and compare? No, I did not. Big duhhhhhhhhh . . .
DeleteIMO, the main reason Lyle's work appears to be mostly nude is because the nudes were mostly what his customers wanted and bought (because it was so hard to get otherwise.) I have worked with the family of a former Lyle model, and their collection was almost exclusively non-frontal which suggests that Lyle offered both, depending on what the customer chose to order.
ReplyDeleteI agree about customer demand back then driving what we see today. With a few notable exceptions, the classic era physique photographers did not keep comprehensive archives. Most of what we know about the non-archived work is what was handed down by collectors. So naturally their choices about what to buy matter in two ways. First, we only see what was passed down the line, and second, what the photographers produced was influenced by what sold best.
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