OH BOY!
Turns the lens toward masculinity, from the perspective of a woman who has spent a long time not looking. Born out of necessity, approached with curiosity.
Oh Boy! turns the lens toward masculinity, from the perspective of a woman who has spent a long time not looking. Born out of necessity, approached with curiosity. Not a final statement, but an attempt to understand what it means to be a man — so that I can keep asking what it means to be a woman.
I love photographing women. That's my natural habitat. I love the shapes and forms of female
bodies, and I'm curious about the stories of the women standing in front of me. There's always a point of view when I photograph a woman, a certain way I want to present her to the world through my lens. I see them as women first, then as my subjects.
Photographing men has always been a different story. In the past, especially when working with models, I simply looked for angles that felt right to my eye. I've been told the boys in my photos look "soft," perhaps because I'm subconsciously uncomfortable with hyper-masculinity. Growing up in a society that disproportionately centers male stories and perspectives pushed me in the opposite direction. For years, my work has been a hyper-focused study of womanhood, asking what it means to be a woman, then and now. With men, I've tuned out intention and focused only on aesthetics.
To understand how we got here, however, it's not enough to stay inside the echo chamber of one perspective. So I went back through my archive to see how I've been photographing masculinity without meaning to, and then I picked up my camera again, this time with intention. I sought out male subjects I normally wouldn't photograph, and tried to stay open in the room with them.
Oh Boy! is organized in three sections. Archive revisits my earlier work with male models: the
softness, the aesthetics, the avoidance. New Work brings together portraits of everyday men alongside still life of objects I associate with masculinity. Partnership observes how men are, and how they behave, when they're with the people they love.
This is not my final statement on masculinity. It's a personal exploration, an honest look at a subject I've spent a long time keeping at arm's length, and an attempt to look at it with curiosity instead of
avoidance.
Valerie Yuwen Hsieh, born in Taipei, based in Tokyo
