Der erotische Männerakt ist wieder Thema in der Photographie. Vorbei scheinen die Zeiten, als der weibliche Körper ein Dauerabonnement auf Begriffe wie Schönheit, Sinnlichkeit und Verführung besaß. Künstler wie der Fotograf James Spada entreißen das männliche Antlitz, den maskulinen Body dem Dunstkreis des Durchschnittlichen und entdecken in jedem Bild in jeder Aufnahme, wie atemberaubend ein Mann wirken kann, wie aufregend sein Körper ist, wenn man es nur sehen will. James Spada sieht es und zeigt es uns mittels einer eindrucksvollen  Bilderserie.

James Spada has been well known for his internationally best-selling biographies of Barbra Streisand, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Redford, Princess Grace, Bette Davis, Peter Lawford,  Bette Midler, and others. His eighteenth book, John and Caroline, Their Lives in Pictures, is currently in bookstores and has received uniformly positive reviews.  For more information on this book and James Spada's other books, click here: http://www.jamesspada.com

Over the last two years, Jim has also become equally renowned for his evocative photographic studies of the male nude. He had been an amateur photographer since high school. After he moved to Boston from Los Angeles, he enrolled in the New England School of Photography's evening workshops division in 1997, where he studied black-and-white darkroom techniques with Nick Johnson, the studio nude figure with Christina Hajosy, and color printmaking with Tom Petit. It was at that time that he was inspired to begin his on-going project "Black & White Men."

Spada had his first one-man show in August 1998 at the Against the Grain Gallery in the artists' colony of Wellfleet on Cape Cod,  and another at Francesca's Gallery in Boston's South End in December of the same year. His third one-man show hung in the New England School of Photography's prestigious Gallery One in Boston from January 17 through  February 18, 2000.  Twenty of his images in the "Edwardian Men" series were on display at the Radiant Light Gallery in Portland, Maine in September 2001. 

"I've been taking pictures since I was a teenager," Spada says, "but it took a back seat to my celebrity books. Now I want to be known as a hyphenate, a writer-photographer. Photographing people is very much like writing about them, except that I'm creating the portrait with light rather than words. Light is as much a subject for me as the model. Some of these men emerge from darkness into the light. Others are bathed in it, seeming to take comfort from it. Still others respond to the illumination with pride, showing off their beauty to it as they would to a lover."

"B lack & White Men," a hardcover book of sixty images from this project, is now available for purchase. Jim's new project, "Edwardian Men," which has been  featured in "Blue" magazine's February 2002 issue, will be published in book form in 2004.

Click here for a look at Jim's book "Black & White Men"