Lives of the Saints for Boys

Lives of the Saints for Boys is an intimate series of portraits, combining photography and text, which intimately explores the call of gay desire. This project looks at men, not only as figures of impassive strength, but also as figures of vulnerability, sensuality and desirability, or, more-often-than-not, an uneasy complex union of these qualities. Inspired by the works of Caravaggio, Zurbarán, and di Rebera, this project embraces theatrical language in which dramatic contrasts between light and dark are used, without camp or irony, to dramatize, elevate and honor the ache of human longing - the elusive demands of desire.  This work adopts the visual and verbal rhetoric of devotional painting and poetry, in which the desire to be consumed by the Divine, through ecstasy or suffering, or both, is experienced and expressed directly through the body. This rhetoric is unexpectedly placed in the center of gay identity to look anew at the meanings and riddles of masculinity and desire. As renewed political attempts are made to label that desire as dangerous and ugly, these images seek to portray that desire as profound, beautiful, and deeply human.