BOB'S WORLD
The Life and Boys of AMG's Bob Mizer
Dian Hanson
Includes a FREE 1-hour DVD of Mizer films, spanning 1958 to 1980, specially edited for this edition.
A lavish coffee-table book that is cram-packed from cover to cover with the glorious technicolour prints of one of the pioneers of gay porn photography. Both playful and highly erotic, most of the images date from the mid 1960s when he started photographing athletic youths and muscular men fully naked.
Bob Mizer famously spent 48 years making photos and films for his Athletic Model Guild, and 41 years publishing Physique Pictorial, America's first, and most explicitly gay, physique magazine. His diaries, kept from the age of eight, make it clear that he was openly homosexual from his late teens, but until the age of 42 he lived and worked in his mother's Los Angeles rooming house, where his strict code of ethics prevented him from fully expressing his fantasies. Therefore, for the first 24 years of his career he worked in black and white and was careful to never show a man fully nude, but following his mother's death in 1964 Mizer rapidly built a kingdom dedicated to the pleasures of male flesh, where he photographed entirely nude men in psychedelically saturated colour.
In the 1970s and '80s Bob Mizer's compound, centered around the old rooming house, became home to dozens of his young models, who lived outdoors on couches and porch gliders along with chickens, geese, goats and monkeys, Roman statuary, cast off Christmas trees and every conceivable prop for his increasingly quirky films and photography.
288 pages, 230 colour photos, 25 x 33cm, large-format hardback
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