The first of two slender volumes of black-and-white portraits from the San Francisco leather scene document a time, a place and a way of life as definitively as Weegee’s tabloid images did the street life of New York in the 1940s. The men and women captured in Rosen’s simple, uninflected pictures—lit flat against seamless backdrops—constitute a pretty effective visual census of contemporary SM culture, or at least its more unabashed exemplars. The leathermen, body-modifiers, dyke daddies and radical hets look optimistically out from the frames, needles through their genitals and fists in each other’s orifices, reveling in the photographer’s uncritical acceptance. Though a few mighties of the rad-sex underground, including Susie Bright and Fakir Musafar, put in benedictory guest appearances, most of Rosen’s models are drawn from the rank and file of the SFSM party crowd.
Indeed, the very unpretentiousness of Rosen’s style is a kind of agitprop in itself. Avoiding both the idolatrous neoclassicism of Robert Mapplethorpe and the voyeuristic grotesquery of Joel-Peter Witkin, he treats his subjects neither as icons nor as freaks, but rather as folks. In the process, he invites us to do the same. Given his unflinchingly graphic depictions of sadomasochistic practices from fisting to penis bifurcation, the invitation is pretty seditious. Almost as subversive is the casual indifference Rosen and his friends demonstrate toward conventional ideals of physical attractiveness. Received notions about what body types are suitable for sexual portraiture clearly have no applicability here. The sincerity of desire, rather than the statistics of age, weight and chromosome count, is the source of sexual allure. If Rosen’s vision is skewed toward sadomasochistic utopianism, it is a useful corrective to the transgression-for-its-own-sake approach of so much contemporary SM-derived imagery. IL

Publisher: Shaynew
Paperback: 63 pages

The second of two slender volumes of black-and-white portraits from the San Francisco leather scene document a time, a place and a way of life as definitively as Weegee’s tabloid images did the street life of New York in the 1940s. The men and women captured in Rosen’s simple, uninflected pictures—lit flat against seamless backdrops—constitute a pretty effective visual census of contemporary SM culture, or at least its more unabashed exemplars. The leathermen, body-modifiers, dyke daddies and radical hets look optimistically out from the frames, needles through their genitals and fists in each other’s orifices, reveling in the photographer’s uncritical acceptance. Though a few mighties of the rad-sex underground, including Susie Bright and Fakir Musafar, put in benedictory guest appearances, most of Rosen’s models are drawn from the rank and file of the SFSM party crowd.
Indeed, the very unpretentiousness of Rosen’s style is a kind of agitprop in itself. Avoiding both the idolatrous neoclassicism of Robert Mapplethorpe and the voyeuristic grotesquery of Joel-Peter Witkin, he treats his subjects neither as icons nor as freaks, but rather as folks. In the process, he invites us to do the same. Given his unflinchingly graphic depictions of sadomasochistic practices from fisting to penis bifurcation, the invitation is pretty seditious. Almost as subversive is the casual indifference Rosen and his friends demonstrate toward conventional ideals of physical attractiveness. Received notions about what body types are suitable for sexual portraiture clearly have no applicability here. The sincerity of desire, rather than the statistics of age, weight and chromosome count, is the source of sexual allure. If Rosen’s vision is skewed toward sadomasochistic utopianism, it is a useful corrective to the transgression-for-its-own-sake approach of so much contemporary SM-derived imagery. IL

Publisher: Shaynew
Paperback: 71 pages