PHOTOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER James Bidgood might agree with a sentiment expressed in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband: To be natural “is such a very difficult pose to keep up.” From 1960 to 1970 the period between the US court decisions affirming the redeeming social value of male physique photographs and subsequent ones establishing a legal definition of pornography Bidgood constructed an elaborate artificial world for himself. His small, hermetic body of work combines eroticism and a vivid, campy vulgarity. Although artists such as Pierre et Gilles, David LaChapelle, and Steven Arnold have ransacked
As the groundbreaking artist and filmmaker dies, revisit this Another Man interview from 2019, in which Bidgood reminds us that “you have to feel art. It demands a physical response”