Physique
A major visual archive of the clandestine golden age of American physique photography, drawn entirely from the private collection of Vince Aletti, the New York critic and curator who has spent five decades assembling one of the most significant holdings of this once-underground material.
Physique reproduces more than 250 rare photographic prints by pioneering studios and photographers including Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild, Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles), and Don Whitman's Western Photography Guild. Sold discreetly through mail-order catalogues and physique magazines that posed as fitness publications, these images of posed male bodies constituted a coded homoerotic visual culture made largely by and for gay men under legal threat, in which photographic prints offered connection, solace, and an emergent queer visibility. A personal essay by Aletti traces the historical and political significance of the pictures and celebrates the artistry of the photographers, models, and studios behind them. Designed by Bruce Usher as a debossed flexibound volume, the book carries back-cover tributes from Nan Goldin, Collier Schorr, and Ryan McGinley, and appeared alongside a 2025 exhibition of prints from the collection at Dashwood Projects, New York.
Aletti (b. 1945), longtime photography critic for the Village Voice and The New Yorker and the first journalist to write about disco, is among the most influential chroniclers of photography's printed forms. Physique is his second collaboration with SPBH Editions, following The Drawer (2022), and extends the collection-based books Male (2008) and Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines (Phaidon, 2019).
