[factory sealed] SNAP INSTANT PHOTOS BY DAVID SPRIGLE (2000) Gay NUDES Beefcake Muscle Photography

This is a rare vintage FACTORY SEALED / UNREAD and out of print copy of SNAP INSTANT PHOTOS BY DAVID SPRIGLE, by Stephen Patrick Foery (Editor), David Sprigle (Photographer), Arthur Tress (Introduction) and published and distributed by FOTOFACTORY PRESS in 2000 featuring the nude male photography of photographer DAVID SPRIGLE. This 96 page HARDCOVER book and DUST JACKET measure 8.25 x 0.75 x 10.25 inches. See photos for condition.

In SNAP, Sprigle fundamentally changes the way we understand the beauty of the accidental moment. These images of rough elegance are reminiscent of the attenuated figures, movement and tension of Baroque Paintings. Yet, the characteristics are random--products of ostensible lighting conditions. The photos, Sprigle's newest series, are a visual essay about our instant culture. About a new aesthetic that arises from the intersection of cheap consumer technology and art. He presents a sanctioned voyeurism: reality tightly cropped, frontally composed and blurred by time to become unexpectedly beautiful. His color pallet, seemingly based in oil paint rather than photographic grain, is drawn from the Impressionistic Masters. Sprigle's work examines the way light rearranges an almost-classical memory of the human form.

In 1917, French Artist Marcel Duchamp, one of the founding fathers of post-modern expression, signed a toilet and called it art. David Sprigle photographs nudes with a toy camera and calls it a book.

Like Duchamps's toilet, Sprigle's art arises from within the sphere of domesticity: he uses one of those instant cameras often advertised in the context of a children's birthday party to capture young adults prancing about his Venice Beach home. You will not know them for they are NOT celebrities, but his subjects are people who comprise the mundane fabric of a typical Los Angeles life.

Sprigle asks his subjects to take off their clothes. To get hard. To jump up and down. This "deviant" activity is captured via blurry timeslices from his Polaroid camera. The photographs reveal Sprigle's magic--where a crisp, clear reality, after the familiar click and whir of the mechanism, becomes instantly muddled and somehow, unexpectedly beautiful.

Sprigle engages his models in redemptive fantasies. His manner seems European, most probably German: derived from artists who, seeking freedom from past public indiscretions, proclaim deviant sexuality and eroticism. Sprigle invites his subjects to reveal and accept their own, often suppressed eroticism as art. I have seen people reluctant to bare themselves soon revel in the liberating experience of prancing around naked for someone who acts more like a therapist than a photographer. The camera is almost superfluous as Sprigle's confident and bold banter validates the fact that...

...his subjects, and most-likely each one of us... is a bit of a freak... sometimes aberrant. Pure and simple.

But like Duchamp's toilet, this aberrance is ubiquitous and essential to our livelihood: for we all must express.

A post-modern aesthetic often mandates fucking things up. The imperfect / accidental / unexpected allows us critical distance from our modernist longings for definitive answers--for that prior simplicity, predictability and the safety of our mother's wombs. With things fucked up, we are forced to establish new paths to resolution and understanding: to abandon the systematic... to be reborn unto ourselves.

Soon we realize that the nagging desire to conform to the principles implanted in us by ideological state apparatuses--religion, politics, entertainment, family--often holds us down. One of Sprigle's subjects, while jumping up and down, with a big boner shamelessly slapping around says with veritable glee, "I guess I'll never be president now." Wryly, Sprigle responds, "Well, if that happens, l will sell you the photos for millions."

He will not have to.

Given a comfortable, casual location, and a machine which instantly renders some sort of record, both photographer and subject have affirmed erotic expression, all for the sake of creating blurry splotches of color on a plastic card.

The photos, striking testaments to the physical movement accompanying this sudden liberation, are small and intimate. And ironically, in the shadow of perhaps the biggest state apparatus, Hollywood (which broadcasts its stiff righteousness in large, visual perfection yet secrets its deviance in tabloids designed to be discredited), Sprigle presents these tiny, seemingly insignificant records of aberrance as art--jubilant manifestations of momentary personal autonomy. Apparatuses of empowerment.

Sprigle could be anyone. He should be your friend. The one with the camera who asks you to do silly things for his lens, then shows you the result as you laugh and ask for a copy.

Yet what you will find here are ultimately photos of friends fooling around. And while the photographs created can be wholly disconnected from the context of their creation, the honesty of the exchange between photographer and subject lies latent in the abstract exposure of flesh. Make this a guidebook to realize that art--not as a business but as a feeling and experience--is often unexpected, uninhibited and aberrant. Really, though, just simply personal.

Stephen Patrick Foery, Editor Los Angeles, August 1999

From the Author
"This is what I want to do with you today.... It's a series of blurred Polaroids.

Most people are faceless." -- David Sprigle speaking to his Venice Beach models for Snap photo series.

Best known for his photorealistic black and white portraits and nudes of ordinary people, Sprigle defined a movement of homo-erotic photographers which emerged in the early 1990s not from the world of fashion or commercial photography, but rather from the trenches of a changing--often personal--reality. Sprigle has long sought to document and incite shifts in America’s relationship with eroticism by casually capturing unguarded naked moments. The Polaroid series presented in SNAP echoes his sociological motive and an emphasis on gesture and structural precision, through the abstract exposure of a visual choreography.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"Venice Beach of the Mind" Introduction by Arthur Tress,

David Sprigle is part of the scene, the "Venice Beach of the Mind" scene, that tireless beach-front promenade of the floating world. A never ebbing flow of eclectic humanity gliding past and beneath his windows. From his second floor perch over the boardwalk, through his salt-sprayed picture windows, he descends like a voracious seagull, hard and sharp of eye, upon this drifting urban playa: the jetsam of L.A.'s dark edge, the blanketed homeless, the pierced and tattooed, the shirtless skateboarders, the frantic surfers, the visiting fireman. It's a carnival parade of a perpetual Mardi Gras--an infinite set of character actors awaiting only Sprigle's recognition for their one and only chance at the great Hollywood screen test. Done spontaneously by an instant camera.

His studio is his apartment, complete with turquoise walls--pre-fifties--post-punk hung with classic erotic art and thrift shop paintings. On his coffee table are the latest beefcake calendars and Hustler Magazines, comprising a fit reading room for the polysexual personae of the late 90's. Sprigle pulls the boys and girls from the streets below up to his studio. There, they undress, become erect or fondle breasts for him without reservation. "It's only a Polaroid." One that nonetheless throws out mini-posters of our most private moments, uniquely designed for our culture of instant gratification. We permit these Polaroids, stillborn in a second, to probe our sensual bodies because they seem not real--only transient touches recording our insubstantial, translucent selves. Willingly, we give our skin to his lens because he defines for us what we want ourselves to be: warm sensations of undefinable flowing energy translated into blurred, grainy, and warm-toned images from his camera. It excites us... and we love him for it.

Of course these private snapshots of our sexual temperature are never taken to the drug store, but given immediately to hold in the hand and view in startled awe. They have registered and read the depths of our simmering erotic selves, molten to the eye and burning to the finger's touch.

If you could touch these rose-colored, scintillating bodies. If you could run your hands down the thighs, around the breasts, along the erections of Sprigle's subjects, you would feel the Braille of secret wants, palpitating in pitch to the pores of trembling fingertips.

These images are purposely vague and indistinct so you can penetrate beyond the flesh and into the bones while loosing the edge of your own identity, blending with the images into one formless pulse of desire.

Like the sepia-toned, vibrating visions of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron's great grand dames, Sprigle's Venicians are "polarized" into new stop-action figures. They burn to become alive in the pupil of your eye and in the palm of your hand. Let them breathe again.

Arthur Tress
Cambria, California

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