ROUGH GODS
Around 1980, I started using a Polaroid camera. I loved that it was instant and during the process of developing the image, the chemicals merged in such a way that a unique and vibrant color photograph was realized.
At that time, if I wasn’t taking concert photos with my 35mm camera, I was taking Polaroids of men I picked up on the street. But I hadn’t achieved a complete artistic vision yet or intuition as a professional photographer.
I used my 35mm camera for music portraits and live concert photos, but my Polaroid 600 was strictly for pictures of bodybuilders, construction workers, one-night stands, men who fit into the aesthetic of what I was interested in. Over the years, I’ve taken tens of thousands of Polaroid images.
After I left the music business in 2004, I decided it was time to start working professionally. The aim was to exhibit my work in established galleries with the ultimate goal of securing a publishing deal.
But then, in 2008, Polaroid began reducing their production and finally shut down their plant.
Due to marketplace conditions, Polaroid has discontinued almost all of its instant analog hardware products . . . Polaroid has also made the difficult decision to cease manufacturing of instant film products. . . . 1
I was livid. I scoured every camera store in New York City for Polaroid 600 film. Retailers had now jacked up the prices of the remaining film from $8.99 per pack to $24.99 per pack. Fuji started making instant film at one point, but I didn’t like it. Then a company called The Impossible Project2 launched and purchased the Polaroid patent. They went on to continue making instant analog cameras and film.
The moment it came out, I tried some of their film, but it sucked. I returned all of the film and fought with them to get my money back. About a year later, an application came out on the iPhone called Hipstamatic. It sounded like it would solve all my instant woes because this new app, despite there being no actual film, provided faux film effect in color, classic black & white, and tin type. I was able to extract the images from the iPhone and was surprised to find that I could make exhibition prints up to 30 × 30 inches in size, with pristine effect. It was a testament to the revolutionary merging of the history of analog cameras with the new technology of the Apple iPhone.
In early 2005, I was wandering through the East Village when I came across a store featuring vintage fashion photography, prints, and books. It was owned by a man named Mike Gallagher. We took an immediate liking to each other. I thought Mike was totally fabulous.
The store was on the corner of East 11st and 4th Avenue, and it was called Gallagher’s Paper Collectibles.3 It sold every fashion magazine in history—Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar—some dating back further than 100 years. The main space was on the first floor and the archives were in the basement. Mike was friends with many well- known artists and photographers, such as Bert Stern, known for Marilyn Monroe’s “The Last Sitting,” as well as Henri Cartier Bresson, Steven Meisel, and Richard Avedon. Mike’s basement had the musty smell of aged paper and it was a treasure trove of history.
I told Mike that I took pictures of men and I was looking to get a book deal.
“What kind of pictures again?” he asked, curiously.
“Male erotica.”
That surprised him. Mike was heterosexual, and I could sense that he was thinking to himself, “What am I getting myself into?” But Mike liked me and asked me to show him some of my work.
I was delighted and a few days later I came back with about twenty 16 × 20 prints and laid them all out on the floor.
“This is what I do,” I said.
“What kind of book do you want to make?” he asked.
“I’m thinking it would combine powerful male portraits with gorgeous flowers to deliver an erotic punch.”
He looked at the photographs again.
“You know, let’s start small,” he said. “I’m going to give you $5,000 dollars for the book you want to make.”
I was so grateful. I immediately did research about small printing presses and found one in Canada called Westcan Printing Group. I asked them what I could get accomplished with $5,000.
They were really nice people and told me I could get two thousand copies of the book I wanted to create. So under my own press company—Scatterbrain Press—I printed my first publication and I called it “rough gods.” I really liked the way those two words worked together because it reflected 100 percent the type of image I was capturing in my photos. I never photographed professional models because I thought they were much too homogenized. They all looked the same to me. The men I photographed were big, sexy brutes—tattooed, scarred, built.
The book rough gods was laid out and designed by my friend Anthony Sellari. It was printed in Canada and a limited selection were numbered and signed. It sold out all two thousand copies.
This slim volume is filled with exactly what you would expect from such a title. The rough- hewn images of masculinity on display here are at once iconic yet accessible. These are no inflatable porn dolls, detached and vaguely unreal in their ascetic roles as visual playthings. These are candid glimpses into the beauty of unvarnished man. Often tattooed, unshaven, and bulging in all of the right places, they never stop being themselves for the camera, creating a surprisingly intimate artistic experience. Often combined with diptych and triptych sets of rusty pipes or stark still life images, these are gods indeed, but the draw is in their unmistakable humanity.4
A few months after the book was published, I secured an exhibition at the CBGB Gallery on the Bowery, which was right next door to the original CBGB’s club. It was so exciting to have my work finally exhibited for the first time, along with the release of my first book.
At this time, there were other photographers creating images of masculine men but they were more fashion-oriented and extremely glossy. I knew nothing about that approach at all. I think the appeal of my work was that the images were very simple, in a no-nonsense way. They had a raw essence and a quality about them that was very “in-your-face.”
The book got into the hands of a publishing company in Berlin called “Bruno Gmünder” and, sometime in 2009, one of their agents called me.
“We would like to make a book with you,” he said.
So, I started to figure out the concept for a new book. The words “brutal” and “truth” kept running around in my head. Meanwhile, Sean Lord from s. c. lord design in Baltimore, called me and said he wanted to do an exhibition of my work—even on the telephone, I could tell he was a very kind and caring person, and he understood my “rough gods” concept.
The Baltimore exhibition was so popular I was featured on the cover of the Gay Life newspaper, and also in the LGBTQ publication Baltimore OUTLoud.
The merging of those words “brutal truth,” like the words “rough gods,” appealed to me. I liked them because I believed they reflected the artistic vision of the images I was capturing, which were brutal, yet revealed an undeniable truth about the men themselves. I ended up naming the show at s.c. lord design, “Brutal Truth + Beauty.”
In this second book, I decided to include poetry along with the photographs of flowers, though it consisted mostly of erotic male portraits. I loved breaking up the rhythm in the book so that each picture would appear more dramatic. By juxtaposing the images of male erotica with flowers and poetry, when one came upon the photograph of the nude man, it had a much more profound effect. I also paired certain images, because of a given color palette, which made them more evocative. Unconsciously, I was inspired by the ghost of Robert Mapplethorpe. I titled the book, Brutal Truth, and it is a provocative 250-page volume of raw sexuality.
The book sold about five thousand copies. Bruno Gmünder were very shrewd. I didn’t get an advance, but I got two hundred books. I was allowed to sell the book on my own, though not to retailers. I decided to put word-of-mouth and social media to work and I posted Brutal Truth up on my Rough Gods Facebook page, which had over 100,000 followers. I numbered and signed a small 5 × 7 print and inserted one into each copy of the book. At first, I made at least $10,000 on my own and then I decided to put it up on Amazon and sell it at my gallery exhibitions. It was an instant hit and is now a collector’s item.
In between rough gods and Brutal Truth, I put out a ’zine called Faggot, which focused on a guy named Robert from Canada. He had a tattoo that read “Faggot” on his stomach, which he proudly displayed. I also started getting interest from alternative spaces and more prestigious galleries. The first one was at Brian Marki Fine Arts in Portland, Oregon.
Then I had a show at Magnet, which was in the Castro area of San Francisco. Magnet advertised themselves as: “Men. Sex. Health. Life.” It was an alternative place that offered medical services and psychological services. They also showed art.
I also had a terrific show in a space in Montreal called “Galerie Dentaire.” It was a dentist’s office with a very large front room that looked out onto Rue Amherst. I had shows in New Orleans, San Diego, New York City at the LGBT center, and upstate in Hudson, New York, at a furniture store called F. Collective.
In 2013, I released another book with Gmünder, this one called Beautiful Imperfections. I decided this book would only include photographs I made with the Hipstamatic app, and there would be no nudity. I wanted this book to be equally as charged as my previous ones, but I also wanted it to be more accessible to a wider audience.
I continue to take pictures all the time. For the most part, I have chucked my cameras and mostly shoot with an iPhone, which often surprises the subjects. I may go back to using my digital cameras in the future, but I completely love the Hipstamatic app, and the pristine quality of the images I get from it. The photographs also come out of the camera app in a square frame, which I aesthetically prefer. I get a charge seeing anything in a square. I want everything I shoot to take on a provocative and seductive quality. Whether it’s a flower or a heavily tattooed person, I do my best to set a moody and atmospheric tone so that the energy occurring between me and the subject results in an unpredictable and dramatic photograph. As Carol Friedman writes on the inside flap of the book’s dust jacket:
“Sensuality reigns in Beautiful Imperfections, where street art, tattooed Romeos, flowers and muscle men are seduced and celebrated by Alago’s ever watchful eye.”