Clarence, 2005
Digital photograph

Gennaro, 2005
Digital photograph

Geoff, Westside
Highway, 2005
Digital photograph

The Photography of Michael Alago
by Rob Hugh Rosen

Among the many subjects that intrigue photographer Michael Alago—a flowering plant, a gravestone, a muscular tattooed man—he seems especially fascinated by the last, and it is these photographs that fascinate me. I see them as belonging to a decades-long tradition of physique photography. As an adolescent I sought out physique photographs as a source of sexual stimulation in a time when obscenity laws forbade the depiction of genitalia, of even as much as a pubic hair. As an adult, I have been collecting some of these same physique photographs from the mid-20th century, now perceiving them as works of art. I enjoy the subtle eroticism many of them express, and I’m drawn to their documentary quality.

After studying photography at the highly regarded School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, Alago apprenticed himself to a music producer in the recording industry and went on to have a successful career as a music producer himself. During this 20-year period he indulged in photography as a hobby and in the past few years has turned to it as his sole creative focus.

He claims to have forgotten everything he learned in school, now working exclusively with digital cameras, eschewing darkroom work. He does not digitally manipulate his images and only rarely crops them. Alago also shuns the concept of the studio along with its props and carefully placed artificial lighting: he works only with available light or flash. What we see is essentially the product of quick, spontaneous, intuitive decision making. With the camera's viewfinder as a canvas, Alago creates the finished composition. This is particularly evident in his Polaroid work, which capitalizes on the immediacy of the technique. He is also drawn to the allure of its jewel-like scale.

Alago is particularly interested in documenting images of hypermasculinity, and his passionate pursuit of this male image has attracted many extraordinary-looking men to pose for him. Massively muscular men, often tattooed, are the most frequent subjects. When asked what other aspects interest him, he answers “scars.” On further consideration, he adds, “scarred on the inside and out.” He recently began plans to do a photo essay on a homeless man.

He has spoken of being inspired by the photography of George Dureau, Jack Mitchell, Jack Pierson, John Dugdale, and others—all represented in the permanent collection of the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation. However, he feels most influenced by the simplicity of Roy Dean's work and its expression of masculinity. Alago notes that “Roy Dean’s models weren’t perfect.”

As I write this, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City is having an exhibition of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), entitled “Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition,” in which they are compared to the Mannerist and neoclassical art of the sixteenth century. I think Michael Alago’s work can be viewed in this light.

In his seminal book Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting, Walter Friedlaender de-scribes the Mannerist period as the “anticlassical style,” when he writes, “the High Renaissance’s regular, symmetrical harmony of parts becomes unbearable to the anticlassical style.” The overly muscular bodies of Michelangelo’s later work, after about 1520, are typical in Mannerist art. In describing the figures in a drawing by Jacopo Pontormo, Friedlaender speaks of “severe monumentality [taking] the place of [High Renaissance] grace.” In Mannerist paintings, we see that “the volumes of the bodies more or less displace the space, that is, they themselves create the space.” Little interest in the effects of perspective and deep space, and seldom a desire to express an airy space, typify this period. “In disregarding the natural in favor of arbitrary, asymmetric, and almost abstract treatments of figures in space,” art historian Donald Posner noted, “they [the Mannerists] stretched art’s vision and understanding.”

In the Guggenheim exhibition, the curators draw comparisons between Mapplethorpe’s photographs and the works of earlier artists. Although they compare his work to several pieces of sculpture of the neoclassic period, most of the exhibit is taken up with comparisons to the work of the Mannerist printmaker Hendrick Goltzius. However, the curator, Germano Celant, declares that “Mapplethorpe is truly a neoclassical photographer.”

I believe that Michael Alago is truly a Mannerist photographer. His placement of powerful, and often unnaturally muscular, figures in the foreground, precluding any feeling of space, is the most immediate key. The physique photographers of the past worked in a classical style, by directing careful poses with planned lighting, and usually incorporating a sense of airy space surrounding the model. Alago’s work is in contrast to this: he is, to use Friedlaender’s term, “anticlassical.”

Although there are examples less anticlassical in his oeuvre, it is this anticlassical imagery that dominates his body of work, and these are the strongest of Alago’s artistic statements. Seemingly crushing his subjects against the canvas and avoiding depictions of vistas, Alago also uses skewed angles or sight lines to enliven a composition, its asymmetry evoking a 16th century Mannerist painting. The often distorted mass and volume of muscularity in his males expresses an urgent need to overtake, to claim, to render physical strength as a constituent of male power. His “dark alley” figures threaten as they excite all the erotic sensations that come from menace and beauty.

Michael’s recently published book Rough Gods is available in the gallery at LLGAF and on his website, www.roughgods.com.