The Wild Ones: The Erotic Photography of Mel Roberts

A defiant anthology by Mel Roberts (1923-2007), the Los Angeles photographer whose sun-saturated color images of California youth, twice seized by the LAPD, became a touchstone of pre-liberation queer visual culture.

The second of FotoFactory Press's two Roberts anthologies, carrying the series banner California Boys on its cover, The Wild Ones gathers roughly 200 color photographs of young men made between 1956 and 1980, among them images confiscated by the Los Angeles Police Department in the late 1970s and reproduced here from surviving prints and from negatives and transparencies Roberts processed himself, since commercial labs of the era refused to develop male nudes. Edited by David Sprigle with Roberts, the first edition was limited to 3,000 casebound copies and published in conjunction with an exhibition at the David Aden Gallery, Venice Beach.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Roberts served as a combat cameraman in the South Pacific, took a film degree at USC, and worked in Hollywood, including as music editor on the blacklisted Salt of the Earth, before turning his Rolleiflex on the tanned, boy-next-door models of the physique press. Living openly as a gay man and active in the early Mattachine Society, he amassed some 50,000 photographs of nearly 200 models before LAPD raids in 1977 and 1979 ended his career by 1981. His estate is represented by CLAMP, New York the companion volume is California Boys: Photographs from the 1960s and 1970s (FotoFactory Press, 2000).