Photographers - Part 91

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was an iconic photographer of male nudes.  At the start of his career in 1973, people received an invitation to Mapplethorpe's first show of his Polaroid photos in the back room of New York's LIGHT gallery.  When they opened the invitation, they saw the photo above with an adhesive dot.

And when they removed the dot, they saw this self-portrait of Mapplethorpe with his camera.

Here's another 1973 Mapplethorpe self-portrait.

If you want to know what the rest of Mapplethorpe looked like, here's a 1978 self-portrait with a whip up his butt.

Of course he didn't just take self-portraits.  This photo is called "John NYC", 1978.

Marcus Leatherdale, 1978.

Ron Sims, 1978.

Phillip, 1979.

Scott Daley, 1979.

Charles Bowman, 1980.

Dennis Speight, NYC, 1980.

Man in Polyester Suit, 1980.  The model is Milton Moore, Mapplethorpe's lover.  In 2015, this photo sold at auction for $478,000.

Bob Love, NYC, 1981.

We end with Thomas, 1987, but there are hundreds more Mapplethorpe nude male photos.

Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989 at age 42.

Calendars - Part 92

King's College Rugby Calendar 2015 

These images are from the King's College, London, 2015 rugby calendar.  The gallery of images had no indication of which image went with which month.

Like most British nude calendars, the proceeds went to charity, in this case, Broken Rainbow UK, an organization that helps victims of LGBT domestic violence.

Above, studying in a library.

The copper lion is Reggie, the college mascot.

A game of billiards.  Like most British nude calendars, frontal views are carefully blocked.

Relaxing at a bar.

This looks like a library hallway.

Locker room antics.

A class in human physiology?

The Round Reading Room, Maughan Library.

Going up?  Or perhaps a part of you is going up.

Relaxing in a formal setting.

Stairway to heaven.

School's out – kick up your heels.

Protests - Part 91

Mexico Nos Faltan

Above, two protesters in October, 2014, protesting the disappearance and murder of 43 students that happened on September 26, 2014 in Ayotzinapa, Mexico.

In Ayotzinapa, a group of over 100 male students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos school had marched to protest the local government's discriminatory hiring and funding practices.

A group of the students commandeered three buses to travel to Mexico City.  The police set up roadblocks and stopped the buses.  What happened next is unclear.  Apparently the police opened fire, killing 6 and wounding 25.  A few escaped.  The rest were hauled away by police, never to be seen again.

The Nos Faltan (we are missing) protest in October, above, demanded to know what happened to them.

In November, three members of a crime gang confessed that they had killed 43 students who had been handed over to them by the police, shooting them and burning their bodies.

In January 2015, photographer Edgar Olguin staged and photographed his own protest using naked models.  Most of the models were women, but there was one man.

His back says "Femicides, disappearances, narco-state, Welcome to Mexico".  I don't know why it says femicides, since all 43 murdered students were male.

What happened?  One theory is that the buses contained heroin, unknown to the students, and the Mexican Army intercepted the drugs on behalf of the traffickers, with the students being killed to eliminate witnesses.

Ivy League Posture Photos - Part 70

Ivy League Posture Photos 

Yale started taking nude photos of incoming freshmen in 1919 as part of a program to detect and correct posture problems.  The Yale photos have erroneously been associated with William Sheldon, a psychologist at Harvard and author of Nazi-like eugenic theories who used Harvard nude posture photos to illustrate his theory of somatypes.  The Yale program predates Sheldon, and, as far as I can tell, the Yale photos were never connected to Sheldon's work.

Here are posture photos of seven more Yale students that I had the opportunity to acquire.

Yale freshman E. M. on October 8, 1953.

In 1952, Yale installed an apparatus using mirrors to photograph the front, rear, side and top view.

Yale freshman Hiram Percy Maxim on October 8, 1953.

Note the strange pins stuck to each student's back and chest.  The pins were stuck on at specific points for later posture analysis.

Yale freshman David Newell Flood on September 30, 1941.

Photos taken before the fall of 1952 show only a side view.

Yale freshman Henry Thomas Motz on October 6, 1941.

Supposedly, by examining the angles formed by connecting the points where the pins touched the body, certain posture problems could be detected.

Yale freshman J. W. on September 30, 1941.

If posture problems were detected, the student had to attend remedial posture sessions, and a second posture photo was taken.

Yale freshman Leigh W. Hunt on March 4, 1941.

Freshmen were told to report to Yale's Payne Whitney Gymnasium, and once there, they were told to strip.  The photography and analysis of the photos was conducted by the staff of the gymnasium.  Nobody outside the gymnasium staff saw the photos.  The photos were not published for other students to see.

Yale freshman Leslie Sterling Waite, Jr.  on September 30, 1941.

The posture photo program was discontinued in the 1960s, and later, most of the photos were burned.  However, some of the photos escaped burning, including the photos that I have been showing in this series.

*          *          *

Note: some of my followers consider these photos an invasion of privacy for the students.  To protect the privacy of the students, I redact the names of students who may still be alive.  I only publish the names of students who have died.  Legally, the right to privacy does not extend beyond death, i.e. it does not extend to spouses and relatives of the deceased person.

I consider these photos to be a historical record of the time.  Almost all of the Ivy League posture photos were burned when their existence became widely known.  In my opinion, that was akin to book-burning of books that someone claimed were obscene.  These photos are not obscene.  They should be celebrated, not hidden away.

Ads - Part 89

The Ad That Can Only Be Seen on SBS

SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) is Australia's public broadcasting network, funded by the government.  In 2025, they ran a promotional ad for the network called "The Ad That Can Only Be Seen on SBS" that featured full-frontal male nudity.

This is the ad.  It got widespread publicity, even from rival commercial networks, causing many Australians to tune in to SBS just to see the naked ad.  Hopefully people kept watching SBS for other reasons.

Weighing In - Part 91

Bradley Skeete

Bradley Skeete,  born in 1987, is a British boxer.  Above, he weighs in for a fight against Colin Lynes in November 2013 for the English welterweight title.

I think the guy in front of the scale was holding up a modesty cloth, but he held it so low, we got a full frontal view of Skeete, although he covered himself with his hands.

And after the weigh-in we got a quick rear view of him.

Skeete looks like a skinny little thing, not a big muscleman, but he won the fight, and he held the British welterweight title from 2016 to 2017.  His overall record is 29 wins and 4 losses.

Events - Part 91

Maslin Beach Nude Games

Maslin Beach is near Adelaide, South Australia, on Australia's south coast.  It was proclaimed the first legal nude beach in Australia in 1974.

Soon afterward, it began hosting an annual event called the Maslin Beach Nude Olympics.  However, in 2013 the Australian Olympic Committee told the Maslin organizers that they could not use the word Olympics in their title, so it was renamed the Maslin Beach Nude Games.

The event features just-for-fun nude competitions not likely to be mistaken for the real Olympics, such as the sack race (above) ...

and the three-legged race ...

and the tug of war ...

and the Frisbee-throwing competition ...

and the Tissue Box competition, in which each contestant's partner tries to throw ping pong balls into the empty tissue box suspended above their butt ...

and the marathon, which isn't a real 26 mile marathon, but just a run up and down the beach.

And let's not forget the Best Bum competition.  These were the winners one year.