Jack & Mack, (Hardcover)

Chris Komater challenges and subverts received ideas of

beauty and the representation of the male body. The bear

movement embraces an ideal of beauty outside of the

mainstream, exalting men with lots of body hair and heavy

builds. For his photo series "Jack & Mack," Komater

photographed two stars of bear porn films. He's torqued these

images with a diHerent kind of artifice, posing Jack and Mack

in gestures borrowed from the Renaissance paintings of

Caravaggio and Bellini, bringing together two very diHerent

registers of physical expression and blurring the distinction

between the sacred and the profane.

Accompanying the photos are essays by Les K. Wright, bear

historian, photographer and author; Robert Glück, New

Narrative co-founder, writer and artist; and Earl Jackson,

essayist and author of Strategies of Deviance, Studies in Gay

Male Representation.