In June of 1998 the world lost a legend. Don Whitman was the artist behind Western Photography Guild.
His brilliance in combining beautiful men & nature earned him scores of fans.
by David Chapman
Using the rugged and majestic Colorado Rockies as a backdrop, physique photographer Don Whitman demonstrated that the nude male was right at home in this natural setting. Recording the male physique in the repressive 1950's was always a delicate balancing act, but thanks to Whitman's high artistic values and personal integrity he was preserved from the forces of reaction. Don was always a class act, and even the bluenoses seemed to recognize this.
Despite the high quality of his product, it does not mean that his pictures were any less erotic. Whitman's art was dedicated to recording the muscular male body in all its athletic beauty as well as its innate sexiness, but Don's eroticism was always muted and suggested rather than overt. It was as if he treated his subjects as beautiful works of art set in an untamed wilderness.
This also meant that Don Whitman's young men had to be well built and self-confident because when he took them out into the wilds of the Colorado back country, they had to measure up against the rugged crags and pine-covered mountains behind them. It was Don's particular genius to have the knowledge and the taste to display these men in a setting that (in the hands of a less skillful photographer) would have made the models seem puny and dwarfish despite even the greatest musculature.
Several years ago, I had the great good fortune to produce a book on Don Whitman's work; this was Mountain Men, and while I was putting that book together, I came to know Don very well. I think I understand how he operates and why he is so unique in the physique world. The Denver-based photographer was one of the most benign and caring people that I have ever met, and I am grateful that I was able to meet and work with him. Most lovers of physique photography know that Don Whitman was a masterful photographer, but I'd like to share a few personal reflections that reveal other sides to his nature.
In response to the many customers who wrote to him and asked for details of his models' lives, Don began compiling skillfully wrought biographies of his men and sending them with the pictures. For most of the men, a one-paragraph summary of their lives was sufficient, but for a few of his more popular models, like Mark Nixon, Gene Garramone, Duane Knaus, and Paul Labriola, two close-typed mimeographed sheets accompanied the photo sets. Those hoping for salacious details of the young men's private lives, however, would be disappointed. Aside from the occasional comment about how popular the models were with the fair sex, most of the biographies are pleasant and upbeat accounts of earnest youths trying to make it in the gym and modeling culture—at least as it existed in the 1950's.
Unlike the young men who gravitated to Robert Mizer's AMG, these youths are not wayward street hustlers or would-be Hollywood hunks. They are all-American boys next door and are presented as such. All was not sweetness and light, however; and despite their wholesomeness, an occasional darker side to a model's past is hinted at: brushes with the law, wild oats sown in the past, minor indiscretions. For instance, we are told that Paul Labriola is "a handsome, healthy young man just out of his teens [who] has encountered his share of confusions, unhappiness, and doubt." Is this a veiled reference to questions about sexual preference? Don leaves the implications of these (and other) enigmatic statements to the readers' imaginations. Like his beautiful but often coy photographs, these bios revealed and hid in equal portions.
Another quality that struck me time and again was Don's genuine, avuncular affection for his models. Most of them were local boys who would drop by his studios when they thought Whitman would be around. This is a highly unusual situation in the world of physique photography where the subjects of photos are often used, very often abused, and then discarded by the men who take their pictures. This exploitative attitude was completely foreign to Don who became a confidant and helper to these men as they tried to figure out their own "confusions, unhappiness, and doubt."
There was only one time when Don and I had anything approaching a difference of opinion. As a historian, I wanted to assign dates to the pictures that we included in the book, but Don was very reluctant to do so. In the end, we left the dating out of the book. There were a couple of reservations that Don had. First, we could never be absolutely certain when the pictures were taken. Because of a disastrous flood in the early 1950's, most of the photographer's log books were lost (but Don had such perfect recall, I suspect he could have come up with a date very easily). The second reason was more philosophical. He insisted that in the past he had avoided dating the pictures because, as he explained, "each pose is a moment of time which remains fresh and does not age. . . Not to draw a brash analogy, but how many know the exact year of Michalangelo's David? Or care?" I bowed to his logic, and left out the dates, but in a compromise we did agree to place the pictures in chronological order as exactly as possible.
Don Whitman's vision of the male physique is unique. He treated each of his models as individuals, and the respect that he showed them was returned many times. When Don died in June of 1998, his funeral was attended not only by his large extended family, but also by many of the men whom he had recorded for the past fifty years. These middle-aged men (often accompanied by wives and children) returned to pay their last respects to the kindly genius who had captured them at the height of their youth and beauty. Few physique photographers have ever enjoyed a similar testament.
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