Masculinities: Photography and Film from the 1960s to Now: Liberation through Photography

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Masculinities: Liberation through Photography explores the diverse ways masculinity has been experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed in photography and film from the 1960s to the present day. Examining increasingly fluid notions of masculinity over the past six decades, this book offers a culturally diverse collection of work from some of the world's most celebrated photographers. The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of guided tours and film screenings including Revolverkino at the Gropius Bau (11–13 November 2020). The guided tours take place on Sundays from 3 – 4 pm, on alternating weeks in English or German. Over to Carlos to guide you through your Vogue-Chi activity, along with some suggested music to play:

If you’re photographing yourself or someone else - be sure to make the other person feels comfortable and safe and that you have their consent. Daniel is a photographic artist whose work explores how we can use photography to process our experiences. This photographic activity prompts you to consider what masculinity means to you through a mixture of objects, reflection and creative writing.

“I didn’t want men to come and find themselves alienated from the show. It is full of humour.”

Annie Hayter is a Barbican Young Poet. She won BBC Proms Young Poet in 2011, and was runner-up for Times Young Poet 2012. She’s performed at the Southbank Centre, Barbican, and on Radio 3. She is published in MAGMA and TimeOut. Daniel Regan is a photographic artist whose work focuses on complex emotional experiences, often using his own lived experience of mental health difficulties as the stimulus. He’s interested in how we use photography as a way to process life’s experiences and can find a deeper understanding of who we are through photographs.

Critical race theory A branch of scholarship emerging from the application of critical theory to the study of law in the 1980s, critical race theory (CRT) is now taken as an approach and theoretical foundation across both academic and popular discourse. CRT names, examines and challenges the social constructions and functions of race and racism. Rejecting the idea of race as a ‘natural’ category, CRT looks instead to the cultural, structural and legal creation and maintenance of difference and oppression. Scholars working in this field include Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Patricia Williams. Fetishisation To turn the subject into a fetish, sexually or otherwise. Fetishisation in terms of gender and desire frequently occurs in conjunction with objectification and power. Men and women of colour are frequently fetishised by white people, in society and in artistic practice, through different stereotypes and limitations. Trans and disabled people are also subject to fetishisation, particularly in bodily terms. Kobena Mercer’s critical essay on Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘Reading Radical Fetishism’, 1 and David Henry Hwang’s play and afterword to M. Butterfly (1988) both explore the notion of fetishisation. It’s an idea expressed by Simone de Beauvoir’s famous formulation that “One is not born but rather becomes a woman”, and one that’s been developed by contemporary thinkers such as Judith Butler, whose 1990 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity espouses the notion of gender as performance. Putting the emphasis on gender as a cultural construct, the show suggests that what’s considered ‘masculine’ is relative: that it shifts over time and place, that it can be questioned and changed, and that it can and should be expanded to encompass a wider range of identities – including the ageing male body.

There is not much here about work – unless you count the wall of Hollywood actors playing Nazis. You would never think, from this show, that men ever earned a living, cooked a meal or read a book (though there is a sententious vitrine of Men Only magazines). Beyond the exceptions given, there is scarcely anything about the heart or intellect. Men are represented here almost entirely in terms of their bodies, sexuality or supposed type. Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Gropius Bau, states: “Today, common perceptions of what it means to be or to become a man are increasingly questioned, especially for younger generations, who are confronted with these questions in a completely different way. The exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography offers a nuanced examination of masculinities in all their facets and shades. The works by over 50 international artists on view in the exhibition build a bridge from classical images of masculinity to gender-fluid identities, thus doing justice to a complex reality.” Your object can be as serious or playful as you want it to be - perhaps you want to poke fun at the very concept of masculinity? Homosociality Typically non-romantic and/or non-sexual same-sex relationships and social groupings – may sometimes include elements of homoeroticism, as they are frequently interdependent phenomena.

Barbican Art Gallery reopens Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, a major group exhibition that explores how masculinity is experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed as expressed and documented through photography and film from the 1960s to the present day. The first British retrospective of Sunil Gupta’s work brings together material from across his long and varied career, from the scenes of everyday gay life in New York that he chronicled for his breakthrough series, Christopher Street , in 1976, to 2008’s elaborately constructed and highly symbolic vignettes, The New Pre-Raphaelites. “What does it mean to be a gay Indian man?” he has said of his photography. “This is the question that follows me around everywhere I go.” Read more. 4 Photoworks festival 2020 In the wake of #MeToo the image of masculinity has come into sharper focus, with ideas of toxic and fragile masculinity permeating today’s society. This exhibition charts the often complex and sometimes contradictory representations of masculinities, and how they have developed and evolved over time. Touching on themes including power, patriarchy, queer identity, female perceptions of men, hypermasculine stereotypes, tenderness and the family, the exhibition shows how central photography and film have been to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture. Watch

“By deconstructing or destabilising, and disrupting, and to a degree resisting these tropes of masculinities, it also allows for a certain emancipation of masculinity,”

At a time when ideas around masculinity are undergoing a global crisis and concepts such as “toxic” and “fragile” masculinity are shaping social discourse, over 300 works by 50 international artists including Laurie Anderson, Richard Avedon, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and Wolfgang Tillmans offer a panorama of filmic and photographic explorations of masculinity rife with contradictions and complexity. The show also highlights lesser-known and younger artists such as Cassils, Sam Contis, George Dureau, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Hank Willis Thomas and Karlheinz Weinberger, among many others. Touching on themes of patriarchy, power, queer identity, race, class, sexuality and hyper-masculine stereotypes, as well as female perceptions of men, the works present masculinity as an unfixed, performative identity. Yasmeen Lari outside a women’s centre on stilts she designed in Sindh province, Pakistan. Photograph: courtesy Heritage Foundation of Pakistan 3 100 Day Studio, by the Architecture Foundation A vast, ambitious and timely group show that featured more than 300 works from 50 artists, including Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Annette Messager, Catherine Opie and Karlheinz Weinberger, Masculinities explored the ways in which maleness is represented, coded and challenged through the medium of photography. Highlights included Karen Knorr’s acutely perceptive series, Gentlemen, which explores male privilege and entitlement through the prism of private male clubs in Mayfair, and Jeremy Deller’s film about wrestler Adrian Street, a study of a peculiarly English form of theatrical high camp. Read the full review. 1 Zanele Muholi