I raise the camera in a studio that fades to something as focused as breath’s rhythm and a shutter as I capture the male body in photography. Now, in front of me stands a man who has worked months, optimising himself toward this moment. Some arrive soft-bellied and still glow; the light rarely discriminates. Light clings to what it finds in its own way, the second it hits the subject. He is still and shaking with excitement, somewhere between giddy, alive and stoic all at once. Both of us anticipating that the fruit of all this planning and preparation will result in a selection of remarkable images that let the outside world know that this is one example of a strong body with a bit of dedication and focus. It’s a complete illusion, a temporary suspension of vitality, and only one side of the complex coin of modern masculinity.
Each photograph is a small act of our control. The model wants their body to look perfect; I want to make an image that feels alive in the eyes. Between those two often conflicting desires, it is a truth I am chasing. I want the viewer to fall in love.
I’m aware that I photograph beauty inside the same system that perverts and distorts it. That contradiction has become a language to navigate with caution. And my contribution in terms of style, energy and limitation has always been to try to add to where the classics left off. Seeing beauty with a purity in artistic intent. To respect the art with the reverence they gave marble, only now through light and skin.
Konstantin is Espalda. MatadorES Series. Vitality and the Male Body in Photography.
Pietro’s Legs. Obsession Series.
Noah is Slide. Obsession Series.
My work is less about seduction and more about admiration. There’s a world of difference between revealing and exploiting. This is something you can sense instantly in an image. My photographs may expose the body, but they never invite possession. They’re studies in presence, in how strength and innocence can occupy the same frame without collapsing into product of lust.
This is a tricky thing to navigate in male art photography. It’s quite hard to explain a perspective to someone who has not had a similar exposure and can normalise it. I believe it comes from my desire to want to see the beauty from within, despite presenting its exterior. It guide a softness to my work. A perspective that was not built but earned by watching hundreds of men drop their mask to reveal a softer, unvarnished personality.
When light skims the surface of a body and encounters lean structural order, something deep in the brain responds. That instinct runs through every culture in diverse ways, varying surface to surface but comparatively rapid within our evolutionary wiring. Our brains evolved to scan muscle tone, posture, and symmetry for safety, fertility, and genetic fitness, cues that still light up reward centres, informing us a body is healthy. To an ancient mind, a body that looked capable meant better odds of survival, protection, and strong offspring. Even now, the brain interprets that form as a sign of order in the system, everything functioning as it should. But that’s the illusion of manipulating the physique into an optimised state for a photograph verse the longevity of a healthy body that is comfortably above base level, all year round.
I meet some fitness models who have traded everything but their soul to achieve that sub 10% body fat ahead of trying to capture the achievement in imagery.
Mattias is Mármol. MatadorES Series. Vitality and the Male Body in Photography.
It shows up in the grit of teeth, the bulge of veins in the temples and flush of red which tells the camera exactly where all the blood and tension is trapped. It’s hard to extract beauty from that, despite the model believing that they look fantastic. Trying too hard is unattractive, and the viewer sees through it. It reveals an undesirable transaction.
In fact, part of my edit process is to view each photograph by initially zooming in to such an extent that I can only see the face and eyes specifically. I then begin whizzing through an image selection solely based on the expression of what the eyes are communicating. When I have made a solid selection, I revisit the reduced set of images to see what the body is doing, and make a further selection, knowing that each image communicates a sense of wonder in the face. If their eyes do not tell a story that enquires to their unforced beauty, I value the image less. I have no favourites when it comes to models, but Mattia Pecchini is a standout who can embody all qualities that make an image look great, whilst effortless at the same time.
The lens both masks and unmasks perfection. It indicates health and strength but it also quietly renders it a fragile decoration, something most can only sustain for a few hours before complete exhaustion. Outtakes are proof of that. And so, the idea of beauty warps from ownership to a place of construction. Photographers have a unique perspective of seeing behind the scaffolding of beauty. We see the subjects hopes, dreams and insecurities as we create. it’s a window behind perfection that suffers from the same fears we all do. We are all try to invent ways to escape death and proving we matter.
Ignacio is Thine Own Self. Obsession Series.
Riccardo is Mantle. MatadorES Series.
A huge bonus in my work is discovering where each model sits on that spectrum, when the outside world would see only the perfect image that is showcased. It’s as if each image presents itself to you, whilst retains a secret key of information not quite visible in the frame.
I believe it’s why my images are not charged expressions, or deliberate provocation, in the way a model’s body can so easily become a prop for someone else’s fantasy. That language has less to do with what I’m trying to make. My pursuit is to display material that makes the viewer curious about the model’s beauty within just as much, if not even more than the exterior.
Some men arrive rehearsed. They’ve checked themselves out beneath bathroom lights, pre-packaged with their own mirror-image parades in confidence before I even lift the lens. The tension rises through their throat and jaw; each pose is a strain. They confuse control with vitality, and the camera captures this tension.
Others arrive unguarded. They breathe, move, blink their way through a shoot. You can sense the body that belongs to itself. In these times those times, the light seems to obey and complement perfectly. There is no wrestle with the light to make things work.
Music helps break the armour. I employ whatever rhythm loosens the mind: Classical for portraits, Dance for surrendering predictability. Opera when I’m trying to evoke something dramatic. I shot a guy who could only relax when the studio was filled with Thrash Metal. The noise made him malleable, alive and seemed to shut off what was previously a destructively self-conscious grimace, on the Zoolander end of things. His body became kinetic, free, and sculptural. I was fascinated that such aggressive soundtrack unlocked that kind of beauty as they seemed at odds with eachother. The images from that day still vibrate with the sound of Holy Moses.
Tingle Down My Spine. Obsession Series.
The Traverse. Structural Architecture of the Male Body
There are those who forgot how to believe in themselves. They come back bigger, tauter, redder than before, obsessed with the fact that they gained X amount more muscle mass, whilst their skin has taken on the new texture of a basketball, signs of performance enhancing abuse, chasing a picture of power that keeps slipping further out of proportion. They mistake transformation for change, sculpting themselves into collapse. The health that once sang so beautifully, now flicker as bloated, sweaty gains.
It’s painful to witness. Some ruin their beauty because they are afraid of losing it, some because they never truly believed they had it to lose. They reconstruct themselves until they are no longer magnetic, but mechanical, something they can control. Spectacular power but crumbling beneath the weight of freezing another kind of perfection.
The kind of visual beauty that presents itself in a youthful, optimised body is only one fleeting note in a much larger song. It cannot be owned; it is borrowed for a moment, celebrated, held gently, then released. The healthiest subjects barely try to hold on to it. They glide with it as passengers as the body matures. They let that vital glow pass straight through them, where it quietly merges into character, warmth, and the deeper radiance. It’s been a privilege to witness this evolution with some models over the years.
Years of shooting men has changed how I view male beauty. A friend might indicate someone on the street with a “He’s beautiful,” and I always pause to examine with about 50% of the enthusiasm. I’m aware of the layers and masks of beauty. The external married to the internal. And the second piece is rarely visible off the bat. It is, however, magnetic when the inner rhythm of a person syncs up with the outer form and the individual can hold both effortlessly as beauty and brain collide. Without this beauty has a hollowing and is more decorative, like a beautifully crafted instrument with no music in it.
I often compare the classics to how beauty is discussed in the available forums today. Like the weather. Something we like to share in passing, in the communal ways. Now it’s a ranking system as camera phones put us all up for inspection. We no longer sit comfortably with the topic of beauty in the ways we could when appreciating classical perfection in marble, we’d sooner rate one image to another whilst algorithms decide which faces and bodies the world should revere in everything from social media to dating apps. Every selfie is a little audition for belonging. We experience beauty, these days, not as passive observers but by comparing ourselves to it, a breeding ground for our insecurities. It’s then easy to understand why beauty becomes controversial if it exists but we cannot own a piece of it for ourselves.
Horizon. Structural Architecture of the Male Body
Kilian Isaak, Nagai, Luiz Piva, Martin Foru by Daniel Jaems.
Algorithm still runs on Hot-or-Not DNA where every swipe is a tiny audition. That ancient instinct is now data that gave the social media platform its initial power. It makes it tricky to display imagery in those spaces without it stirring up comparative forces.
There are other forces that I have seen first-hand. Beauty can still change something inside of people. A viewer attracted by surface discovers empathy where they never thought to find it. A man they might otherwise overlook, by race, gender or orientation, comes to them through a common language of adoration. Beauty softens prejudice. It opens a window before a gate of fear or bias slam shut. Beauty can come to be a sort of diplomacy, and in that attention understanding starts to grow.
But the very systems that can heal are aggressive consumers. I scroll through my own work on social media and see the environment it lives in. Beauty is all around it, hunting for similar validation. The body as advertisement. That radiance of health as evidence of worth, often centred on a Western appetite. A little hit of reassurance with every like. I feed that machine, it feeds me along with everyone else. The escape isn’t tidy, it’s just consciousness.
Adrien France by Daniel Jaems.
Adrien France, revisited by Daniel Jaems.
Time calls on everyone I’ve photographed. They revisit the studio anew. Some return softer and sharper at once, like aged whiskey. The ones who embrace the shift appear freer. The people who fight it, carry a sadness in their posture.
Sometimes during the editing process, I put their pictures side by side, separated by years, and observe what the light gives and takes through the years, but also what I saw in them during both shoots, because my perceptions of beauty shift as I age too. The twinkle in the eye always remains. It’s like an anchored beauty.
I’ve shot marble gods and dad-bods, ink-covered skin and wheelchair curves. Beauty rewrites its own rules every time. But I’m always in search of what is going on inside the eyes.
Hint of a Devil’s Crown. CounterpArts
Golden Threads. CounterpArts
Ageing brings a softer type of beauty. It has less to do with symmetry than coherence. A man who is no longer in the business of creating a performance of himself burns with a different light. I have witnessed this occur while shooting, as the effort dissipates and the body comes momentarily to rest. Stillness holds its own power. The subconscious screening of safety, fertility, and genetic fitness shine with a new light and this beauty takes on something quite different. It always surprises me how adaptable the mind is, to recognise what it likes and deems authentic.
Health resides in motion, and the body’s capacity to adapt, fail and repair. The camera’s gift is to capture that flash of vibrance before stillness takes it.
And I can’t help but ask myself: Is our obsession with maintaining beauty the dread of vanishing completely? We conflate youth with proof of life, forgetting that decay is one with the same rhythm. Beauty is not the opposite of death. That’s how we make peace with it.
The more I photograph life, the more I realise beauty is linked to borrowed time. To really appreciate it in a healthy way is to be able to accept its impermanence.
Death was something I’d think about a lot when I work. Perhaps because every photograph is a rebuttal to it and we fool ourselves that the image is proof, the opposite of decay is here. What’s really remains is neither evidence nor ornament. It’s why one image is never enough. It’s one of many veins of life and our momentary defiance of time. Our body, whatever note it’s singing today, is part of that same song. We step into the light, but let it pass through us, because it’s all temporary.
– by Daniel Jaems
