I’ve always been fascinated about the relationship between father and son. Growing up without a father, I’ve always wanted to know what it was like to have this male figure in my life, and the “passages” a boy goes through with his father into adulthood. Exploring these topics, I have been interested in looking at the sexual, and almost incestual aspects to these bonds and their relation to what I don’t know, and what I desire. I’ve always wanted a fatherly figure to look up to, to show me what “It’s meant to be a man” and to give me that stern hand of guidance for a “lost boy” in this world. You can say that I have fetishized these scenarios, but what one cannot have, they will always desire. This series will continue to look at what it’s meant to have these things, but also to have them in a homoerotic way, satisfying both mental and sexual desire.
Teaching Son To Shave
2009
30 x 30 inches
Archival Pigment Inkjet Print
Christmas with Dad and his sons
2009
30 x 30 inches
Archival Pigment Inkjet Print
Weight bench
2010
24 x 36 inches
Archival Pigment Inkjet Print
I think this is fascinating! I think that you may be on to something here. If I may be frank, I have been conflicted. I think that homosexual acts are wrong, BUT I think that this passage to manhood is necessary for EVERY man. I probably don’t make much sense, but I have taken up the idea that all men have this drive to “be a man”. I think every man and woman is attracted to his or her own sex to some degree. I think the homosexually inclined person, in general, may have taken that primordial need to “be a man” and hyper-sexualized it to the point that “to be a man” means “to have sex with other men”. NOW, in no way do I think that this idea is the truth(if it is even understandable at all–sorry, sometimes I am unclear), but I, at the very least, think that it is something worth pondering. This “Daddy and Son” collection seems to have put a finger on something that I have been pondering for a very long time.
Yes Joseph. What you said makes a lot of sense to me!