Finns

Going back to the SA-Kuva Archive of the Finnish Armed Forces for another World War II series.  Here we see some men emerging from a sauna, a Finnish cultural tradition that they managed to maintain in a number of inventive ways even in the middle of a war.

This picture has always puzzled be a bit because it's not clear if this is the changing area for a shower room, a delousing station, or a sauna.  The guy toweling off makes me lean toward shower.
Edited to add:  My collaborator and fellow Hawaii resident Larry researched this, and it is a sauna.

I posted this amusing photo on my old tumblr, and it got quite a response.  I don't know if it was the interesting plumbing fixtures or the rare World War II chubby guy that got all the likes.

This appears to be a purely recreational swim.  Many of these lakeside photos show men taking baths, shaving, and/or doing laundry at the same time as others are swimming.

These men are getting all cozy in the sauna, an activity that a major war couldn't stop.

1970's Day, Part 2 - Male Nude Art

Continuing the 70's theme with our art session, starting 

with this drawing by New Orleans artist George Dureau.

Mark Allen Isaacson painted Black Male Nude with Sculpture in 1973.

Egon Posselt is an Austrian artist who painted Crouching Boy in 1975-76.

Barkley L. Hendricks painted Brown Sugar Vine in 1970.

Finishing up our 70's art with a piece that may or may not be authentic . . . whatever that means 

when one is referring to Mark Beard, an artist known for a number or alter ego personas 

through which he expresses a number of genres of painting.  See his wiki for details here .  

This is supposed to be an actual pre-persona student work by Beard from 1975.  Or is it?

1970's Day, Part 1 - Photos

As a pop culture historian once put it, the 1970's began with the holdovers of the hippies, passed through the disco wasteland, and ended with the dawn of punk rock.  Anyway, it's 70's day on the blog, and we start with this 1975 Jim French photo that is the first of today's two Colt images.
Edited to add:  Thanks to viewer Dan for letting me know that this is
Lloyd Beardsley, a model who also did an early photo series for Playgirl.

This 1970 photo of Robert Baker is probably the most recent image in my Dave Martin collection.  Martin's notes indicated that Baker was a student at Emory University in Atlanta, 

and how he came to the California photographer's attention is a mystery.

I wish Google Blogger had a "reblog" button so I could have used it for this 1972 AMG picture of Tico Patterson (right) and an unfortunately unknown second model.  I saw this photo on one of my favorite blogs, Men From Back Then, and just had to use it.  You should all check out this great vintage resource at http://menfrombackthen.blogspot.com/ .  Well worth a visit.

Don Whitman of Western Photography Guild used a card file system to organize the large inventory of male nude photos in his walk-in sales office in Denver.  This is the entry for Lynn Finney who appeared in the "At Home" series of models in domestic scenes.  Mr. Whitman was so meticulous that we even know that this photo was made on October 16, 1973.

This is Bill Cable in a 1972 Jim French Colt photo.

Muybridge by Threes

For Thursday, I'm posting panels of three images by Muybridge,

starting with this baseball batter who, although not my favorite, gets the job done.

Muybridge photographed this young man heaving a heavy weight disc underhanded.

Enlarge if you can for detail.

This is one of only a few of the models in my Muybridge collection who were not photographed sequentially to record motion.  This young man is simply shown in a variety of attractive poses.

Muybridge labeled this "Farmer Digging," 

but I would have called it "Ditch Digger with Pick."

I posted a frontal view of the same three panels on my old tumblr,

but it wasn't nearly as clear as this one.  Expand if you can for detail.