This is a rare vintage UNREAD and out of print copy of BIDGOOD, by Bruce Benderson (Author) and published and distributed by Taschen in 2009 featuring the nude male photography from photographer JAMES BIDGOOD. This 175 page HARDCOVER book and DUST JACKET measures 8 x 0.75 x 15.75 inches. This spine is still tight and an unread condition. The cover and dust jacket show shelf wear. See photos for condition.

James Bidgood is considered the father of the gay pulp and glamour aesthetic. This monograph presents a complete overview of his influential body of work.

“The film Pink Narcissus occurred on the edge of this century's sexual liberation. It fascinated American underground film audiences at the very moment when the showing of sex no longer needed the excuse of art.
This fact holds a certain irony, because Pink Narcissus and much of the photography of its creator James Bidgood stand as some of the most aesthetically superior erotic art available in the postwar years. Bidgood's hyper-stylized Technicolor images of nearly nude males in fantasy costumes and settings were widely distributed just before clothing and decor were about to become absolutely unnecessary in erotica. His films and photography are a link between mediated eroticism - or romantie pornography - and that world of blatant sexual representation in which we now live.

Most of Bidgood's photography and filmmaking was completed between 1963 and 1970, a time when several key court decisions had already chipped away at the anti-obscenity laws in the United States. A 1957 case before the Supreme Court called Roth v. United States attempted for the first time to define obscenitv in relation to the First Amendment and accomplished these aims so vaguely that it left room for a wide range of community standards.

A few years later, several other decisions - including Manual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day (1962), which held that the U.S. Post Office could not refuse services for male physique magazines - effectively limited much of the power of the Post Office and the Customs Service to police the distribution of erotic images. Although James Bidgood's intention never was to emphasize the sexual over the aesthetic, the media in which his photography appeared were the mainstream homosexual pornographic magazines of their time, and he worked during a period when court rulings and community standards were gradually changing the parameters of expression in these magazines.

In the meantime and in the years before, publications whose primary intent was to arouse, especially if their targets were sexual minorities, needed a cover, and each of them found it. Bizarre, a magazine for fetishists of hair, heels, bondage, corsets, amputees, fingernails and blindfolds, published between 1948 and 1959, slyly masqueraded as a fashion magazine for the avant-garde, arousing its readers with alleged fashion layouts of corseted, high-heeled models and photos of bound women passed off as crime-deterrent warnings.

Homosexuals had physique magazines, supposedly dedicated to the relatively acceptable art of physique photography. However, rarely did these publications speak in depth about lenses, cameras or F-stops; nor much about weights, muscle mass or diet. Instead, the short texts accompanying their photographs were more apt to offer archly appreciative comments about the endowments of the models or brief personality profiles of them, as well as hints about vacation places where the beaches featured male adolescents.

Pink Illusions
Water Color
Test Shot
Sandcastle
First Cover
Apache
Huck Finn
Wilow Tree
Gilden Cage
White Guitar
Alphabet Blocks
Op Art
Nude Painting
Mirrors
Holidays
Pink Narcissus
Backstage
Costumes
Memorabilia
Magie in Pink
La Magie Rose

ABOUT THE ARTIST
James Bidgood is seen as the father of the pulp and glamour aesthetic, yet his photographic works are still scarcely known. He came to New York in 1951, intent on becoming a musical star, and earned his first wages as a drag performer in Manhattan legendary Club 82. His serious employment as a window dresser, freelance photographer, and costume designer enabled him to collect the material he needed for his own photo shoots, for which he built complex sets, often in his tiny apartment. In his photographs and films, he pays homage to the youthful male body via elaborate staging of his romantically shimmering visions of a homoerotic paradise.

ALL MODELS ARE 18 YEARS OF AGE.

Due to recent delivery issues with the USPS I now ship all magazines, digests and paperback books via Priority Mail. Up to $100 of insurance is included in this price. I’m selling my collection of vintage 1950-1980s gay pulp paperback novels, pictorial & hardcore magazines, physique photography, magazines, artwork & other LGBTQ ephemera.