Alphabet

An intimate abecedarium of the male body by Peter McGough (b. 1958), one half of the duo McDermott & McGough, who posed nude models into each letter of the alphabet and rendered the results as 26 spectral, deeply queer cyanotypes.

The staged photographs were made in a single day in McGough's Canal Street studio around 2008, then set aside for fifteen years before being printed with the cameraless, UV-exposed cyanotype process, whose inky Prussian-blue tonality gives the images their painterly cast. The poses draw on Hellenistic sculpture and queer photographic histories, recalling Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden's tableaux vivants. Karma published this 56-page clothbound volume to accompany Alphabet at its 172 East 2nd Street gallery in New York, November 1&ndashDecember 21, 2024, where the prints hung in alphabetical rows modeled on Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery.

Since 1980 McGough has collaborated with David McDermott as McDermott & McGough, the downtown New York dandies whose Victorian-era time experiment extended to working in antiquated processes such as cyanotype, platinum, and salt printing. Creators of the Oscar Wilde Temple (2017), the duo's work is held by Tate Modern, the Whitney, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art McGough is also the author of the memoir I've Seen the Future and I'm Not Going (2019).