I Have Gazed So Much
So much I gazed on beauty, that my vision is replete with it — Cavafy wrote those words in secret, about faces and bodies met furtively in the nights of his youth. These photographs were made for the same kind of looking: images of beautiful men circulated quietly among gay men for whom desire had no other sanctioned form. You could look. You could want. The looking was the entirety of what was possible.
The embroidered water fills the space around each figure while his body remains untouched — the photograph exactly as it always was, a surface that absorbed every gaze and returned nothing. These images were invitations — come, look, desire, imagine. But the destination could never be reached. For men who had to remain hidden, the longing had nowhere to arrive.
The model in this series, David Zuborg, was photographed by Bob Mizer for the Athletic Model Guild.
