In Print

During his long and successful career, Christopher Makos has photographed the most beloved and intriguing icons of our time-Mick Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor, Salvador Dalí, John Lennon, and Andy Warhol, to name just a few. Now in a unique and original collaboration, Exhibitionism marks the genius of two of the world's most stylish and impeccable artists-Makos and Calvin Klein-convening to create a daringly evocative and intimately sensual portraiture of the male form. This extraordinary visual conversation began with Calvin Klein's visit to the photographer's studio, where the designer encountered a different side of the acclaimed photographer renowned for his images of Andy Warhol. Klein-one of the most influential fashion designers of the twentieth century-discovered a series of evocative portraits and powerful images that became the seed for this visually stunning project. Featuring over one hundred fifty photographs, ranging from brilliantly crisp black-and-whites to luscious colors to softly muted sepia-tones, Makos' photographs convey sophistication and naïveté in seamless combination. These incredible images do more than just accentuate the nubile qualities of beautiful bodies; they also elevate and personalize our timeless fascination with the erotic. Here, Makos seductively lures the viewer into a celebration of all that is intimately desired in and aroused by the male form in a manner so sensitive that it appeals to men and women alike. With each photograph hand-selected by both Makos and Klein, Exhibitionism is the most intimate reflection of their collaborative vision, and unlike anything seen on the market today. Calvin Klein has reached the pinnacle of success in the fashion world due, in large part, to his fluid ability to think "big picture" over the long-term, while also maintaining a profound attention for detail. The worlds of Makos and Klein intertwine in this exceptional exploration. Klein's sense of style and art and Makos' photographic eye pace, magnify, and inform each other. The result is a book every bit as sexy, intriguing, and daring as the men who created it.

The exhibition is a tour around the geography and society of the Valencian Community: urban and industrial landscapes, historical buildings, people... in a series of pictures taken by the American photographer Christopher Makos, an artist Andy Warhol described as "the most modern photographer in the United States".
Christopher Makos (Lowell [Massachusetts], 1948) grew up in California before moving to Paris, where he studied architecture and later worked as an apprentice with Man Ray. Since the early seventies, he has worked at developing a style of boldly graphic photojournalism. His portraits of anonymous people in night clubs and exponents of the pre-punk, glamrock and punk movements reflect the blunt photojournalism of his early years, capturing the essence of this period in a crude, prosaic style. His photographs have been shown at numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums in the US, Europe and Japan, and published in countless magazines and newspapers all over the world. A key figure of the New York contemporary art scene, he was a friend of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated in printing black and white photographs. He was art director of Warhol's first book of photographs, Exposures, and collaborated in his first photograph exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery. In his work for Interview, Makos produced his "makollages", consisting of strips of several overlapping photographs. He also made audacious full-size portraits using a method of perspective correction popularised by David Hockney around that time. His style has undergone a great transformation; although it still contains a documentary component; he presents his work in large formats confronting images that are apparently opposites but in fact emphasise the author's need to create a closed sequence to tell his stories.
Christopher Makos has published five books: White Trash (Stonehill Publishing Company, New York, 1977), which documents the pre-punk atmosphere of New York City night clubs; Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memory (New American Library, New York, 1989), which contains 150 black and white photographs that are a chronicle of his close friendship with Andy Warhol and the trips he made with him, from Beijing and Barcelona to Aspen and Düsseldorf. Makos' photographs reflect Warhol's world and his personal views of fashion, travel, shopping, photography and art. In his later books, Makos Men: Sewn Photos (Pohlmann Press, Los Angeles, 1996) and Makos (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1997), he concentrates on the homoerotic motifs that make up an important part of the photographer's work in a more and more refined, sensual and elegant style. He has recently brought out Andy Warhol by Christopher Makos, published by Charta, Milan, 2002, a book containing texts about Andy Warhol and photographs of him.

 

His portraits of Warhol, Keith Haring, Tennessee Williams and other artists have been published in magazines like Interview, Rolling Stone, House and Garden, Connoisseur, New York Magazine, Esquire and People. Although internationally acclaimed as a photographer, in the last few years he has also tried his hand at creating paintings and has made artistic silkscreens and serigraphic prints, such as his portfolio on Man Ray, a tribute to his first mentor, and the portfolio Makos' Icons, a collection of serigraphic portraits of Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Salvador Dalí, John Lennon and Mick Jagger.
He made his first trip to Spain in 1983, followed by many others because of the attraction he felt for the boom of Spanish culture and his contact with Madrid night life, reflected in the exhibition of his work held at the IVAM in 2001, where he presented an American view of Spanish culture, continuing in the line of his earlier works

 

 

Undressing Christopher Makos

These boys are really into being out of it. Some of them are way past out of it already, but before they got to that sad point, Mr Make Out snapped their lovely picture. Mr Make Out thinks pulchritude is a boy thing. Boy smell, boy lingo, boy aura, boy taste in the mouth, boys and their boy stuff and boy problems: there are more boys than girls for Mr Make Out. These boys say things like 'I stopped going to school and then I became a stripper for a while with a tour group called Boy Heat.' They are 'straight', whatever that means, yet somehow beyond definitions or caring. A few of these boys have been lifting weights since they were 14 so they can easily pull up their workout shorts to show you their quad and calf development, which is as overwhelming as a new language, but most are skinnier, sleek as minks. They put their hands on their hips but are best doing absolutely nothing, their look a doorway to nowhere.

The opening of the Warhol Museum provided a thrust not only to reconsider Andy and his Andyness but to shift the gaze onto those, like Christopher Makos, no longer shadowed by the silver of his fame. Wrongly perceived as an in house Ron Gallela, Makos and his work have nothing to do with the photography of the paparazzi. Paparazzi shoot the various embodiments of fame and beauty because they consider those bodies to be only what they seem. They can depend upon their placement as distant and different from that of their subjects: this is why they frequently rely upon the telephoto lens. Makos' boys float away like satellites from any notion of what they were. He has no need for a telephoto lens because his work is about proximity and its effects - the schism between fame and beauty and the bodies that produce them. He is particularly enamoured with the vertigo which occurs when the rhetoric of beauty (so long associated with the feminine) is applied to boys - which is why Makos' hallmark is discontinuity; his boys never quite match up.

Makos' first book, White Trash, the best portfolio of 70s New York, was mistakenly thought to be about fame and who Makos knew - Andy Warhol, Halston, Man Ray, Tennessee Williams - when what really motivated it was the anonymous: models (Ava Cherry, Grace Jones), nameless musclepunks, boys safety-pinned into their desire. This project evolved into his 'IN' column for Interview, where the models are men and the anonymous were provided with names. IN was in L.A., IN was in New York, in Madrid, in Paris, in Ibiza to find the boys of the month, the stomach of the month, the sneer of the month. IN allowed Makos to print society-page candids of parties, boy models, cute students, hustlers, brothers of somebodies, knockout nobodies.

Makos' work was as thought-provoking as Bill Cunningham's, but while Cunningham investigated the daily history of dress, Makos indexed a timeless little black book of undress. Toying with the tradition of the fashion photograph caption, he butched it up: 'Edward Privot is majoring in engineering and aerospace design... Chest 46", Arms 19", Waist 32", Thighs 26"., Lederhosen Courtesy of Peter Wise.' In Towel Boys, a home furnishings-style spread, towels by Fieldcrest, Canon, Frette and Hermès wrap around various boys' unbelievabilities of waistline and crotch. Tom McClendon appears to lower himself into view from a chin-up bar. Jonathan Schell shows the striations in his delts and makes a diamond with his hands so everyone pays attention to his tender abs, while singing She's a Brickhouse, to himself about himself, although he has forgotten most of the words. The most winsome and dopey is Cameron Hall, who keeps his sneakers on as he lifts his leg and closes his eyes and smiles because he is as clean as porn and knows he would furnish any home nicely.

Moving closer to learn less, Makos ventured into TV with a show called Makostyle. Hearing these boys speak with voices full of lunar pause and wowed by the sun and themselves, it is now possible to see how all of Makos' work holds a mike up to masculinity, listening to it answering by saying very little and showing everything (whether it understood the question or not.) Makos visits Morgan Windsor, a model who drags on a cigarette and squints as he tells anyone at all about his rock band and how he came to be him. Makos visits Martin James (his model name, since the camera makes him stumble when pronouncing his Polish one.) Makos says, 'Let's do Martin' and when he does, Martin just sits there. Masculinity has never looked so fit and louche, never had such a cachet of do-me. Martin sits and babbles about maybe being a policeman or an actor or an actor who gets to play a policeman. Makos moves on by saying to Martin and anyone else who's listening: 'Well, let's see, how should we end this interview? You know, stand up, just stand up, end this interview - because I want to see how his body has come on from his training - just take your shirt off and let's see how you're coming along.' The boy just grins and stares. He is you. The cares of the world are only weights to be lifted.

Bruce Hainley

What started out as a Visit, turned into a Lifestyle. Not only is Vietnam the new Hot spot, its a place where the past collides with the future, and meet somewhere between. But if your a Surfer, or a connoisseur there is something in Nam for everyone.