Masc
2021—
—2022
I love a man, and when I love a man, what do I love? His body or what it represents? This man or the idea of man? Do I see in it what I want to be or do I project myself onto it? If I see myself in him, we are the same; if I see in him the desire to be like him, I surrender him to the hierarchical superiority of the man he is and that I am not. Do I want him or do I want to be him? This confusion I lend myself to questions my senses: am I the one who fails or is the failure in the assumption of what I have to be? Is it possible to represent this assumption? Can I use the mechanisms I have at my disposal to extract this preestablished idea from certain bodies?
Masc is a photographic series that explores the intersection of three fronts: the male body, the homosexual gaze and the performance of masculinity. It starts from a ubiquitous term in apps and social networks for homosexual men, which means masculine, and which contains a series of assumptions about who uses it and who it is used for. Bodies appear as if exposed, on display; my gaze upon them alters them; my gaze changes before each body. These bodies are simultaneously objects and relationships, the faces force us to consider them beyond their bodies and the studio apparatus reminds us of the staging of everything. The points of contact between the performance of masculinity through male bodies and objects against my gaze as a homosexual man who experience this paradox seek to reflect on the troubling of gender and the distortion of masculinity from the same precepts that solidify it in its traditional form.
Masc
2021—
—2022
I love a man, and when I love a man, what do I love? His body or what it represents? This man or the idea of man? Do I see in it what I want to be or do I project myself onto it? If I see myself in him, we are the same; if I see in him the desire to be like him, I surrender him to the hierarchical superiority of the man he is and that I am not. Do I want him or do I want to be him? This confusion I lend myself to questions my senses: am I the one who fails or is the failure in the assumption of what I have to be? Is it possible to represent this assumption? Can I use the mechanisms I have at my disposal to extract this preestablished idea from certain bodies?
Masc is a photographic series that explores the intersection of three fronts: the male body, the homosexual gaze and the performance of masculinity. It starts from a ubiquitous term in apps and social networks for homosexual men, which means masculine, and which contains a series of assumptions about who uses it and who it is used for. Bodies appear as if exposed, on display; my gaze upon them alters them; my gaze changes before each body. These bodies are simultaneously objects and relationships, the faces force us to consider them beyond their bodies and the studio apparatus reminds us of the staging of everything. The points of contact between the performance of masculinity through male bodies and objects against my gaze as a homosexual man who experience this paradox seek to reflect on the troubling of gender and the distortion of masculinity from the same precepts that solidify it in its traditional form.
© Miguel De — 2022