Speaker Series
Friday, August 15, 2025
Lecture:
7 - 8:30 PM PST
Main Gallery
Free to Members and the Public
This exhibition presents hundreds of Fuji Instax Mini images that capture fleeting, unguarded moments of male intimacy, desire, and self-presentation. Taken during a time when queer visual expression was often coded or concealed, these instant photographs offer a raw and immediate portrait of bodies in play—at once vulnerable, performative, and defiantly ordinary. The Fuji Instax Mini format, with its distinctive tonal qualities and tactile immediacy, heightens the sense of proximity between subject and viewer, rendering each image both document and artifact. Collectively, the images form a vernacular archive of male eroticism that resists spectacle in favor of something quieter: a personal, often mischievous record of affection, humor, and exhibitionism. These photographs speak not only to the aesthetics of desire, but also reflect the politics of visibility in a pre-digital queer visual culture.
Drawing from Reed Massengill’s disarming and playful photographs of all-American men at their most candid, this exhibit reexamines midcentury homoerotic vernacular through a lens of humor, intimacy, and the quiet radicalism of everyday exhibitionism.
Massengill’s work is rooted in an ongoing fascination with the vernacular male nude—what happens when men undress not for artifice or spectacle, but for fun, for comfort, or for no particular reason at all.
Bob Mizer Foundation