Naked
Heartland: Itinerant Photography of Bruce of Los Angeles by
Bruce
Bellas
Photographer Bruce Bellas eventually became
Bruce of Los Angeles, famous for glossy studies of pumped-up
beefcake boys that helped define a whole era of mainstream
homoeroticism.
The pre-World War II photos collected here
(their survival a small miracle) might be titled, "Bruce, the
Forgotten Years." Shot in and around Nebraska, these early
photos let their subjects look naïve, friendly, shy,
seductive-all without the slickness and body-beautiful insistence
of Bruce's LA years. These are bodies before the Gym Age. They
make you think of the photographs Thomas Eakins took of his
students in the 1880s. It's the very ordinariness of most of these
bodies, their mundane, "could-be-me" beauty that makes
them compelling. And that's why this book belongs here, because
these bodies are a bridge to the acceptance and appreciation of
our own less-than-perfect selves. Everything isn't black and white
after all.
"Finally there comes a book that does
justice to Bruce of LA's work. It is merely a start: the photos in
this collection deal with Bruce's early efforts at photographing
the male nude, miles removed from his signature pieces of
oiled-and-pumped bodybuilders in the 1950s and 1960s, and miles
away from California. There is a definite charm to these images, a
naiveté that is preferable in many ways to the later works. Most
of them feature ordinary men in humble, prosaic settings that
evoke the works of Walker Evans and other itinerant photographers
of middle America in the 1940s. The images reveal a charming
aspect of that world with their dingy, apple-pie interiors that
one only finds nowadays in early TV reruns and on the American
Movie Classics channel. The male nudes planted in these settings
hint at a subtle truth about men of the time and about American
life generally. What's more they pose intriguing questions about
the circumstances behind the images. One is tempted to piece
together narratives, for in an age before Elvis and Rock in which
male bodies were covered most of the time, one can't help but
wonder how it was possible for Bruce to capture so many men in
such uncompromising and revealing poses? That we're only
discovering them now implies several possibilities: that there was
an agreement that the photos would remain uncirculated; that Bruce
himself considered them early works and therefore not worthy of
reproduction; that legal restrictions about male frontal nudity
precluded the possibility until the 1960s, at which time they were
already dated; or perhaps all of the above. We can only be
thankful that we have this book to round out the current image of
Bruce as a photographer of slick hardbodies. These photos shock
doubly in that they expose both the softer side of Bruce and a
more hard-core side of middle-American life in the mid-twentieth
century." -- Anonymous Review
"This
collection of photographs are stunning, I had never heard of the
photographer until I chanced on this wonderful collection. That
they were taken in the 50's makes the erotica much more subtle but
beautiful. I could spend hours staring at these amazing
pictures." -- Anonymous Review
