Jack & Mack

JACK & MACK is a book of photographs by San Francisco artist Chris Komater of bear porn stars Jack Radcliffe and Mack in poses taken from Renaissance paintings. The men are photographed nude, from head to mid-thigh, against a black background, their bodies and gestures experienced from a new perspective.

Chris Komater challenges and subverts received ideas of beauty and the representation of the male body. The bear movement embraces an ideal of beauty outside of the mainstream, exalting men with lots of body hair and heavy builds. For his photo series "Jack & Mack," Komater photographed two stars of bear porn films. He's torqued these images with a different kind of artifice, posing Jack and Mack in gestures borrowed from the Renaissance paintings of Caravaggio and Bellini, bringing together two very different registers of physical expression and blurring the distinction between the sacred and the profane.

Accompanying the photos are essays by Les K. Wright, bear historian, photographer and author; Robert GluÌck, New Narrative co-founder, writer and artist; and Earl Jackson, essayist and author of Strategies of Deviance, Studies in Gay Male Representation.