Herlinde Koelbl - Männer - 1985

After the tremendous success of the first auction, 5Uhr30.com (Ecki Heuser, Cologne) now proudly presents the second edition of “Masters of Erotic Photobooks" on Catawiki.
Enjoy another highly personal selection of books dedicated to eroticism in all its beautiful facets - drawn from my private library and from various acquisitions over the past years.

MALE NUDE PHOTOGRAPHY FROM A WOMAN'S PERSPECTIVE.

GREAT BOOK by well-known German photographer Herlinde Koelbl, showing naked men.

“The photographer confronts open, unconditional, unselfconscious, even ‘inviting’ nudity with remarkable empathy, tenderness, and warmth; while masculine aggression or vanity is usually defused through irony. Tenderness and irony may be regarded as the defining characteristics of Herlinde Koelbl’s male nude photographs.”
- Klaus Honnef -

A toast to love, passion, and desire!
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Herlinde Koelbl was born in Lindau, Germany. Her first exhibition was quickly followed by numerous others, both in Germany and abroad. Her photographs are included in the collections of major museums around the world. An accomplished and socially engaged photographer, she has received numerous awards for her work. Koelbl is the author of many books, nearly all of which have become classics within their genre, including The German Living Room, Men, The Fine People, Jewish Portraits, Strong Women, and At Home in Writing.

"Herlinde Koelbl's view of the naked male body remains powerfully provocative. The very fact that this photographic volume, first published in 1984, has now been reissued demonstrates its enduring relevance. It is a book that can rightly be called a classic.
Comparisons with Robert Mapplethorpe are almost unavoidable. Aggression, stylization, understatement, eroticism: Mapplethorpe's photographs of nude Black men—particularly the controversial series Black Book—radically transformed nude photography both aesthetically and thematically. Whereas the transgressive element in his work lay primarily in the "white" perspective directed at the "Black" subject, Koelbl crosses a different, deeply entrenched boundary. Here, it is not the woman who serves as the object of the male gaze; instead, she is the one who looks. She looks back, so to speak, at the man and asks, "When is a man a man?" (the title of an essay by Cora Stephan included in the volume). In his introductory essay, Klaus Honnef even argues that the "'normal' heterosexual viewer" may feel unsettled. Why is that?
Partly, it is due to Koelbl's curiosity. She does not merely undress the male body; she examines it closely, exploring every crevice and opening. Although she employs masks and symbolically charged accessories such as knives, ropes, feathers, and roosters—thereby creating a certain distance and irony—her intention is not to suggest that every phallus is an instrument of power used to oppress women. Rather, Koelbl reveals male vulnerability, exposing the discrepancy between man's social position of power and his private desires.
The photographs also unsettle the viewer because of this very element of desire. Unlike the often modestly averted gaze of the female nude model, these men are fully aware of the camera directed at them. They enjoy being looked at and return the gaze with evident pleasure. This creates a dialogue between subject and viewer that may indeed make the "normal" heterosexual man feel uneasy. Women and gay men, by contrast, may smile at this discomfort and approach Koelbl's photographs with fewer preconceptions.
- RJ Poole -

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100% insurance and combined shipping worldwide.

C.J. Bucher, Munich, Luzern. 1985. Later printing. 18th-21th thousand (for the first time published in 1984).

Paperback (as issued). 220 x 240 mm. 140 pages. 80 photos. Photos: Herlinde Koelbl. Graphic design: Christine Hartl, Bertram Schmidt. Concept: Herlinde Koelbl, Axel Schenck. Text: Klaus Honnef, Cora Stephan. Text in German.

Condition:
Inside super fresh and flawless, clean with no marks and with no foxing, excepting first title page (which has light stains), all other pages excellent. Outside with perfect spine, covers with little trace of use and with some light scratches. Overall fine condition.

Great male nude photobook by Herlinde Koelbl.

"Herlinde Koelbl, born 31 October 1939, is a German photographic artist, author and documentary filmer.
Her comprehensive work is characterized above all by long-term photographic projects, often complemented by in-depth interviews. She is particularly interested in creating portraits of milieus and people. Herlinde Koelbl has received a number of awards for her photographic work, for example the Dr Erich Salomon Prize in 2001. Since 2009, she has regularly worked as an author and photographer for ZEIT magazine, in the column "What saved me".
Herlinde Koelbl was born in Lindau on Lake Constance, Germany, 1939, and grew up there. She studied fashion design in Munich and worked in the field, while becoming a mother of four. In 1975, she discovered her love for photography and taught herself all the necessary techniques.
She taught and gave lectures at the Parsons School in New York, the University of Shanghai, China, the College of the Arts, Sydney, the Art School for Photography, Vienna, and Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles.
Her works are in several private and permanent collections, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, huis Marseille, stichting voor fotografie, Amsterdam, and Jewish Museum, Frankfurt a.M.
Koelbl lives in Munich and Berlin. She is an honorary member of the DGPh, BFF hall of fame.
In 1976 she started working as a freelance photographer, for newspapers like The New York Times, Stern, Die Zeit and others. Already 1980 she published her first photobook The German Living Room. She created her typical working approach by photographing methodically a whole series of pictures, displaying a broad spectre of society. Her first internationally noticed success was the photographic book Jewish Portraits in 1989. She photographed and talked to 80 German-speaking Jews, who survived the Shoa. With this book she established her personal style, which she kept in most of the books that followed. She not only took portraits, but also interviewed the portrayed and added large interviews in the book. Traces of Power may be her best-known work so far. She photographed, filmed and interviewed 15 personalities from politics and business from 1991 to 1998, among them Chancellor Angela Merkel, ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and ex-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. The project was published in 1999, the documentary film with the same title was awarded the Deutscher Kritikerpreis and was nominated for the Grimme Preis. The exhibition was shown at numerous museums, among them the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn, as well as at Art Frankfurt 2002. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave the opening speech at the premiere of the show at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Herlinde Koelbl has published more than 20 books and several documentary films. She has been awarded numerous prizes. 2009 her first large retrospective was shown at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin."
(Wikipedia)