Norbert Przybilla (1953–1996) was a photographer and video artist who was active in Munich, Regensburg, and Berlin. In both his commissioned work and independent projects, he addressed the topic of queer identities. For an overview of his work and an analysis of his estate in the photography collection at the Münchner Stadtmuseum in Munich, see the essay In Focus: Norbert Przybilla and the Münchner Stadtmuseum.
Queer Icons: Robert Mapplethorpe
In 1981 the first solo exhibitions of New York photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) were on view in Germany in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main.[1] While he had already become an icon of the queer art scene in the United States, Mapplethorpe was hardly known in Germany before these exhibitions.[2] The cover of the catalog accompanying the exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein features one of Mapplethorpe’s formally rigorous flower still lifes showing softly illuminated lilies. Although they appear harmless at first glance, both the catalog and the exhibition contain material that provoked German society, including Mapplethorpe’s photographs depicting the homosexual community of the 1970s, explicit sexual practices, and sadomasochist and leather fetishes. The consciously confrontational aspect of the radical images introduced motifs to the art world that had hardly ever been considered worthy of pictures before.[3] Mapplethorpe influenced many later artists with his imagery and decisively raised the visibility of same-sex desire in art, the foundations of which had been laid by queer and feminist activism and social liberalization starting in the late 1960s.[4]
The Frankfurt Mapplethorpe exhibition was also shown at the Kunstverein München in Munich in 1982,[5] and it is noteworthy that, as in Frankfurt, it was another Kunstverein, or art association, and not an institution dedicated to photography, of the sort that was beginning to be established in various cities around Germany in the late 1970s.[6] As was generally the case for photography in Germany at this time, Mapplethorpe’s pictures were rarely sold in galleries and hardly represented in the collections of art institutions.[7] Nevertheless, exhibitions and publications with depictions of queer life and explicit male nudity became increasingly common in Europe and Germany, as had previously been the case in the US. Curator and art historian Peter Weiermair was decisive in this development in German-speaking countries; as director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein he organized exhibitions for many photographers of male nudes and was instrumental in publishing their work.[8]
It is reasonable to assume that Przybilla saw Mapplethorpe’s Munich exhibition in 1982 and was aware of the photography books that were being published. While some of his student projects between 1980 and 1982 occasionally included motifs suggestive of homosexuality, he produced a picture shortly after finishing his training as a photographer that could not be more adamant in its expression of his admiration of Mapplethorpe’s work. It is as if he had picked one of Mapplethorpe’s lilies that are so frequently charged with eroticism and placed it in the hand of a bare-chested young man who raises it to his lips, allowing its liquid to drip into his lasciviously opened mouth and onto his bare chest.[9]
Norbert Przybilla’s "Schwule Männer" Series
In 1985 Przybilla began working on an independent project that he self-confidently titled Schwule Männer (Gay Men). For this series, which focused on the identities of queer men, he invited friends and acquaintances into his studio for the purpose of taking portrait and nude photographs of them. Although Przybilla’s series is less graphic than Mapplethorpe’s pictures, instead striving for subtler, more personal aesthetics, the American photographer’s importance as Przybilla’s role model is unmistakable.
Przybilla considered his series to be a contribution to emancipation and a means to furthering social acceptance of same-sex love. In an undated concept paper that is included in the estate, Przybilla expressed his aim with Schwule Männer:“Gays show themselves as they are, making them beautiful and interesting. Proud. It’s about creating a bit of a memorial, glorifying, and going beyond the target group.”[10] In the era of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the resulting stigmatization of homosexuality, this was also a political statement. For more on the political and social contexts, see the essay Publication and Reception of Norbert Przybilla’s Schwule Männer Series.
Unlike spontaneous photography on location, studio photography usually gives the photographer more control over the picture. For Schwule Männer, however,Przybilla consciously reduced the studio situation to a minimum in order to give the models more room for action. Working with a gray background and uniform light, he allowed the bodies of his subjects to take center stage. Przybilla did not give them instructions on striking poses or using props. Instead of being a creative space for the photographer, the photo studio became a safe space for the subjects, enabling them to have an intimate relationship with the camera and allowing their personality to develop freely.
Przybilla was primarily interested in spontaneity. Describing how he photographed in the studio, he wrote, “The model usually assumes certain poses that he considers favorable. The pictures shown here, however, were shot IN-BETWEEN such poses, in transitory situations that resolve the tension in a spontaneous, extremely natural gesture.”[11] He views capturing the transitory as a conceptual analogy to his earlier independent series Zwischenbilder—Materie in Bewegung (Intermediate Images—Material in Movement), in which he depicted everyday encounters on the street in images that are consciously blurred due to motion. For more on this work, see In Focus: Norbert Przybilla and the Münchner Stadtmuseum. In Schwule Männer, his choice to allow his models unrestricted action is most of all a strategy of authentication. Przybilla always published the photographs with the person’s name and the year the photograph was taken, highlighting the personal aspect. Martin Schwaiger, the artist’s former life partner who served as an assistant while Przybilla created many of the works, explains how the series was created in a zoom interview.
With the exception of a few images, all the photographs in the Schwule Männer series are individual portraits. Due to the fact that Przybilla did not work with professional models, the results vary greatly. Some of the portraits remain close to traditional portraiture, with the focus on the face or the hands of the subject. Others show clothed or naked bodies wearing props as a means to express their individuality, resulting in visually strong images that seem self-empowering and express the self-assured physicality of the person portrayed. Still others reveal a person’s shyness or insecurities, including awkward positions or transitory moments that allow the portrait subject to seem very individual and approachable.
Male Bodies in Artistic Contexts
The varied representation of men—both as objects of erotic desire and insecure individuals—mirrors the gradual transformation of the male image in photography and society. In a patriarchal society, the state of being desired, which is viewed as passive, is frequently associated with femininity, while desire is linked with control.[12] With tendencies of social liberalization in the late 1960s, especially in the United States, artistic nudes in photography reflected a much more varied male image that allowed male bodies to be desired and accepted them also outside of traditional ideals of beauty—such as the athletic and accordingly functional body—or heteronormative lifestyles.[13]
Although there have been naked men standing in front of the camera as long as photography has existed, male nudes were for a long time “hidden pictures,” as Peter Weiermair phrased it in 1987 in one of the first German anthologies on this subject.[14] Well into the twentieth century, images that could interpreted as homoerotic were distributed mostly through unofficial avenues due to the fact that homosexual acts were considered crimes until the late 1960s in Germany and many other European countries.[15] In the nineteenth century, sexual desire was visually stimulated mainly by images of a functional nature that could be interpreted as erotic. These include photographs of nude models that served as visual material for painters. It also included primarily scientific photographs such as the physiological movement studies by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) that caught the erotic interest of viewers.[16]
Photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931) succeeded in widely circulating images that could be interpreted as homoerotic around 1900. He primarily photographed young men, most of whom he met in Taormina in Sicily, instructing them to strike poses and staging them with accessories to make them resemble gods of antiquity.[17] Due to Von Gloeden’s use of art-historical iconography, these pictures can be included in the area of art photography and reception of antiquity, which also served as a strategy for coding their erotic content to avoid possible censorship.[18] Von Gloeden’s male nudes received international acclaim from professionals and amateur photographers starting in the 1890s.[19] They were published in German magazines such as Der Eigene (Our Own) and Die Freundschaft (Friendship), which were published in conjunction with the social reform movement and the first homosexual movement in the early twentieth century.[20]
Von Gloeden also came to the attention of the queer community in the 1980s through photography books, as is documented by a catalog of inventory from the Munich bookshop Sodom, which had a queer clientele.[21] Von Gloeden’s aesthetic is also reflected in a series that Przybilla worked on in the 1990s after completing Schwule Männer. While the humorous working title Ragazzi mit Blumen (Boys with Flowers) is evocative of Italy, the depictions of men with flowers in this series are reminiscent of those by von Gloeden. This series remained unfinished, and Przybilla never exhibited it. It is preserved in his estate at the photography collection in Munich in the form of negatives and Polaroids.
Photography and Queer Activism
The Stonewall Uprising, which started in New York in 1969, was a historical event that resulted in the greater visibility of queer life in society and in photography. The protest against police violence targeting homosexuals and transgender people sparked active movements that strengthened the rights of the LGBTQIA+ communities in the long term.[22] American photographers such as Nan Goldin (b. 1953), Peter Hujar (1934–1987), and Mark Morrisroe (1959–1989) showed with great empathy and warmth the reality and fragility of queer life in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. This also included the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis, which began in 1981 and was unsparingly documented by Goldin and Morrisroe—who like Hujar, Mapplethorpe, and many others also died of AIDS—making photography into an important instrument of activism.[23] In Germany, Jürgen Baldiga (1959–1993) and Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) are celebrated for photographing queer communities, each in their own way. Both frequented subculture clubs in London and Berlin in the 1980s and 1990s, showing their friends and socially marginalized groups.
Although Norbert Przybilla was personally politically active, the images in his series Schwule Männer are not directly invested in activism. His studio photographs consciously distill the situation from the context, allowing the people portrayed to stand on their own. He applied the discipline of classic portraits and nudes to communities that were less accepted by society in the 1980s, offering viewers and subjects alike the opportunity to identify.
Endnotes
[1] The exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: “Black Males” und andere Arbeiten was shown at Galerie A. Nagel in Berlin from January 17 to February 14, 1981, and Weiermair’s exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe ran at the Frankfurter Kunstverein from April 10 to May 17, 1981.
[2] Arthur C. Danto, “Playing with the Edge,” in: Mark Holborn and Dimitri Levas, eds., Robert Mapplethorpe, London/ New York: Phaidon 1992, 311–342.
[3] Allen Ellenzweig, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 127–40.
[4] On the influence that the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 had on art, see Jonathan D. Katz, ed., About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art (Chicago: Wrightwood 659; New York: Monacelli Press, 2024).
[5] Robert Mapplethorpe: Photos aus New York was shown at Kunstverein München in Munich from March 19 to May 2, 1982; https://www.kunstverein-muenchen.de/de/programm/ausstellungen/rueckblick/1982/gott-und-geisel-robert-mapplethorpe (accessed on November 7, 2024).
[6] On the history of institutions with photography collections in Germany, see Anja Schürmann and Kathrin Yacavone, eds., Die Fotografie und ihre Institutionen: Von der Lehrsammlung zum Bundesinstitut (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 2024).
[7] On the market situation of Mapplethorpe's works in the early years, see Jonathan Maho, “An Oeuvre Shaped by the Buyers’ Tastes? The Impact of Compromises on the Reception of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Work,” in: Journal for Art Market Studies, 4, 2018, 1 –13.
[8] For example, Peter Weiermair published the first German catalog on Peter Hujar in 1981 and the abovementioned catalog of the Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt am Main. Both books were published by Verlag Allerheiligenpresse, the publishing house founded by Weiermair in 1969.
[9] Although they initially seem unassuming, Mapplethorpe often highlights the eroticism of the flowers through their arrangements and symbolism, allowing them to be contextualized with his explicitly erotic pictures. See Mark Holborn, ed., Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers (London: Phaidon, 2024).
[10] Norbert Przybilla, concept paper, “Zwischenbilanz: Schwule Männer,” undated, Photography Collection, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Norbert Przybilla Estate, 1.
[11] Norbert Przybilla, “Projekt: Schwule Männer,” undated, Photography Collection, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Norbert Przybilla Estate.
[12] R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
[13] See Alona Pardo, ed., Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography (London: Barbican Art Gallery; Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2020).
[14] Peter Weiermair, Das verborgene Bild: Geschichte des männlichen Akts in der Fotografie des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Ariadne Verlag, 1987).
[15] See “1994: Homosexualität nicht mehr strafbar,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, March 7, 2014, www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/180263/1994-homosexualitaet-nicht-mehr-strafbar/(accessed on November 7, 2024).
[16] Katz, About Face, 11–15.
[17] Ulrich Pohlmann, “Wilhelm von Gloedens sizilianisches Arkadien,” in Meister der Kamera—Wilhelm von Gloeden. Taormina (Munich, Paris, and London: Schirmer/Mosel, 1998), 5–25.
[18] Katz, About Face, 11–18.
[19] Pohlmann, “Wilhelm von Gloedens sizilianisches Arkadien,” 21–25.
[20] Ulrich Pohlmann, “Sehnsucht nach Arkadien,” in Pohlmann, ed., Wilhelm von Gloeden—Sehnsucht nach Arkadien (Munich: Fotomuseum im Münchner Stadtmuseum; Berlin: Dirk Nishen Verlag, 1987), 55–57; and Ulrich Pohlmann, Taormina: Photographien von Wilhelm von Gloeden (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2024).
[21] Sortimentskatalog 1981/82, ed. Buchhandlung Sodom (Munich: n.p., 1981), 95.
[22] Jonathan Weinberg, Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 (Columbus: Columbus Museum of Art; New York: Rizzoli Electra 2019.
[23] On the significance of photography during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, see Ringo Rösener, “Fotografie als engagierte Kunst—Queere Utopien während der HIV/AIDS-Krise,” Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy / Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement und Kulturpolitik 9, no. 1 (2023): 79–104.
Image credits for selected objects
[1] Robert Mapplethorpe, Patrice NYC, 1977, MAP 187 © The Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
[2] Norbert Przybilla, Adam, from the series: "Schwule Männer" (Gay Men), c. 1986, 29 x 23 cm (image) & 30,4 x 23,7 cm (sheet), inv. no. FM-99/84.1.77, © Münchner Stadtmuseum, Photography Collection, Estate Norbert Przybilla
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