Photographers - Part 32

Matthew Leifheit

Matthew Leifheit, above, born in 1988, is a photographer, magazine editor and professor based in Brooklyn, NY.  He is Editor-In-Chief of MATTE magazine, the journal of emerging photography that he founded in 2010, and he is on the faculty of the Pratt Institute and Yale University.

After getting a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, he got a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale in 2017. While at Yale, he took photos for the student newspaper Yale Daily News, which was unusual for a grad student to do. But many of his photos didn't make it into the paper, so he created his own rogue newspaper for his photos. Above is one of his photos showing a student in the showers at the Yale gym.

Leifheit has had several solo exhibitions.  Above is a photo from a 2017 exhibition called Your Giorgio.

A 2018 exhibition was called Fire Island Night.  Fire Island, off the coast of Long Island, has long been a gathering place for New York gay men.  Leifheit is gay and is evidently well acquainted with Fire Island.  Some of the photos in this exhibition were taken in a gay hotel on Fire Island called The Belvedere Guesthouse for Men (above).

Another photo in The Belvedere.  It's a mansion built in 1957 in the style of a Venetian palace.  Leifheit's photos show it filled with naked men, so at first the photos look staged.

But the photo above (not by Leifheit) is from The Belvedere's website promoting the attractions of the place, so although Leifheit's photos of the place may be staged, nudity is apparently not unusual there.

The Fire Island Night exhibition also had photos of Fire Island denizens outdoors.

Another shot of Fire Island outdoor activity.

In 2022, Leifheit published a book To Die Alive containing more photos of Fire Island.  Here are some guys on the roof of The Belvedere.

And here's another outdoor shot, called They Live By Night.

We end with the latest shot by Leifheit that I could find, called Whitman's Sampler.  Matthew Leifheit is only 34 years old, so I'm sure he will be producing many more male nude photos.