YNOT – Prague-based gay adult studio BelAmi has made a sizable donation to the Bob Mizer Foundation, a not-for-profit entity established to preserve and promote progressive and controversial photography. The foundation is named for Bob Mizer, the American photographer and filmmaker who founded gay adult studio Athletic Model Guild.
“In many respects, Mr. Mizer and people like him have made it possible for me to do what I have been doing for 20 years now as of this year,” said BelAmi founder and owner George Duroy. “So it goes without saying that the idea of preserving his early works is a valid and honorable task that I am happy to help make happen.”
Mizer (1922-1992) generated enormous controversy from the 1940s through the 1990s by producing more than 3,000 films and one million photographs designed to appeal to gay men. By presenting scantily clad men in ambiguous, homoerotic poses, Mizer’s artistic work pushed societal boundaries, resulting in a 1947 obscenity conviction for distributing gay pornography through the U.S. postal system. The then-offensive material, tame by today’s standards, comprised a series of black-and-white photographs of young bodybuilders wearing what were known as posing straps — precursors to the G-string.
For daring to immortalize beautiful, clothed male bodies on film and mail them to closeted gay men, Mizer served a one-year prison sentence at a work camp in California.
Dennis Bell, who acquired Athletic Model Guild in 2004, said he founded the Bob Mizer Foundation not only as a tribute to Mizer, but also as a way to illustrate how much gay men have had to overcome in their struggle to be accepted by society at large.
“Since the 1940s, Mizer was a master of producing work that featured beautiful young men and expressed the joy and innocence of youth,” Bell said. “[The concept] is perfectly reflected in the productions of G.Duroy and his team at BelAmi.
“It’s only fitting that BelAmi is the very first studio to actively acknowledge the great debt owed to Bob Mizer by the adult industry with a donation to the foundation,” Bell added. “I sincerely appreciate their support, and we can now begin to move forward with the proper archival needs of Bob’s vintage photographic materials.”
The bulk of Mizer’s estate was unceremoniously thrown in the dumpster in 1992 after he died in Los Angeles. Fifty-year-old boxes of correspondence, studio props and personal artifacts from one of America’s most controversial artists are gone forever. Luckily the core of his life’s work, consisting of about one million photographic negatives and thousands of 16mm films and videotapes, survived, boxed up and locked in storage for the next decade.
In the span of his near 50-year career, Mizer created a body of work that both reflected and skewed American ideals of masculinity, ranging from dramatically lit black-and-white photographs of musclemen to colorful extreme close-ups of male genitals. He photographed thousands of men, ranging from Hollywood actors and bodybuilders to hustlers and porn stars. Mizer’s portfolio contains photographs of unique cultural figures, including action star and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger, Andy Warhol muse Joe Dallesandro and contemporary artist Jack Pierson.
The foundation has established a KickStarter project to help fund the reclamation and preservation of Mizer’s surviving work.
