Masculinities: Liberation through Photography

Through the medium of film and photography, Barbican’s latest show investigates how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day. Examining depictions of masculinity through the lens and brings together the work of over 50 international artists, photographers and filmmakers. What’s really interesting about this show is that rather than exploring the power and assertiveness of ‘masculinities’ having been portrayed for the past centuries in European art, the very same notion is being questioned. Manhood is under increasing scrutiny and terms such as ‘toxic’ and ‘fragile’ masculinity fill endless column inches.

Expect soldiers, cowboys, leather and possibly lots of facial hair, but examined and portrayed with a subverted and tender view. As you enter the first section of the show - Disrupting the Archetype, the military looms large not only as a place of uber-masculinity, but also as a semiotic minefield of conflicting signals. Across different cultures and spaces, the military has been central to the construction of masculine identities – which has been explored through the work of Wolfgang Tillmans and Adi Nes among others, while Collier Schorr and Sam Contis’s powerful works address the dominant and enduring representation of the ‘American cowboy’, which very much reminded me of my all-time favorite - Brokeback Mountain. The very same notion of Masculinity, is called into question by soft and tender portrayal, with a backdrop of the grandeur of landscape, offering up a tender view of masculinity in harmony with nature.

Deep Springs by Sam Contis (1982) investigates the shifting perceptions of masculinity set against the nobility of American West. Between 2013-2017, he spent time at Deep Springs College, an all-male liberal arts college located on an isolated desert ranch. Contis’ reimagining of the cowboy is at odds with the individualistic, rugged, emotionally remote version of this mythologized all-American figure.

Equally affecting in an altogether more conflicted way is Anna Fox’s My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words, in which she juxtaposes “colour photographs of my mother’s tidy cupboards with excerpts of my father’s rantings”. The tension here is between the formal beauty of these miniature pictures – shelves filled with pink china crockery and rose-tinted glasses – with the often grotesque violence of the intricately inscribed words – “I’m going to tear your mother to shreds with an oyster knife”. I’m still haunted by the unsettling nature of this work.

Overall it is indeed a thought-provoking show, interesting enough our visit was on International Women’s Day. It makes you think again about the meaning of ‘masculinities’ vs ‘ feminism’ - maleness in a world increasingly defined by ever more extreme definitions of the same.

Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography showing at Barbican from now to 17 May.