The Brooklyn Rail

A black-and-white photograph, Figure in flooded room with platform, shows a concrete room, empty save for an elevated, four wheeled platform and a body, a man, nude from the waist down, holding a rung of the platform and leaning towards the leftmost wall. There is the body—and there is also its shadow image. Not literally its shadow, which is cast on the concrete wall immediately to the left of the body. Not its reflection, which sits darkly on the surface of a shallow pool of murky water. Its shadow image: the black shroud of a stain on the rear wall, itself appearing like a shadow cast somehow from a triangulation of light, one from the opening to the right and one from the camera’s position. The stain’s rounded top and slightly bent shape mirroring the mushroom-top haircut and posture of the body.

The photograph appears in the middle of Blake Little’s recently released Construction Nudes 1981–1985 and it stands out as an image of vulnerability in a body of work that otherwise banishes that quality to the subtext. It is not the strongest or most indicative photograph in the series, but in context, it is perhaps the most emotionally devastating.

Construction Nudes, Little’s first work made in Los Angeles during the early eighties (though only now appearing in book form), is a series of sixty-five photographs of nude male figures—drawn from the local gay community—posing in construction sites around urban Los Angeles (Little would sneak into the sites with his models and 4x5 camera in order to create the series). I should say sixty-four nude photographs, because in Figure in flooded room with platform, the model wears a white tank-top (though nothing else), the only clothing seen in the series. The clothing jumps out: combined with his relative smallness against the cavernous room, it imbues him with a certain humanity—a fragility, a mortality—mostly missing from the other figures.

I do not mean that the other models are overly mannered or rigid in their poses. Steve, for instance, brings a lithe, sinewy grace to each photo in which he appears—he seems to be in constant motion; even on the page, his muscles almost appear to contract. Rather, the figures seem immortal because of their monumentality. In Russel and Vincent on sand, two men lie atop a sharp-peaked mound of sand—one splayed on his back upside down across the right-foreground, his face an image of deep rest. The is other on his stomach, split in half by the mound’s left slope, his face turned away from the camera. There is an eroticism to the image (another rare quality in the book)—two lovers collapsed in post-coital repose—but it is a classical eroticism. These are not men; these are statues, demi-gods—Greco-Roman bodies with thick curls atop their heads. The mound of sand’s peak resembles a mountaintop, and the sense of scale shifts: these are giants taking a mountain as their bed.

If it has an analogue in classical Greek sculpture, I’m unfamiliar, but elsewhere Little’s references become more explicit. Both Armando pushing back and Brion against curved wall immediately recall Peter Paul Rubens’s or Battistello Caracciolo’s paintings of St. Sebastian, an early queer icon (Brion comes close to mimicking St. Sebastian’s pose in the latter painting). Little’s Sebastians are not pierced with arrows, instead surrounded by nails or rebar, closely suggesting rather than literalizing both the arrows and the wounds. Nor are their hands bound—we see them in a sort of dance, as if they had dodged the projectiles and been spared their martyrdom, allowed to remain men. Armando reclining on plywood shelves plays on Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521), in which Jesus lies emaciated, slack jawed, and vacant in his coffin, depicted in a claustrophobic, thinly horizontal dimension. Here, Little has zoomed out: instead of the constrained form, we see a three level plywood structure in the center of a room. Little resists Holbein’s abject vision, instead capturing Armando while he turns his lower body away from the camera: writhing, maybe, but alive.

This monumentality comes close to rendering the men into pure form, architectural like the buildings they inhabit. Little certainly plays upon the affinity between the nude bodies and the bare surroundings: concrete and bodies stripped of all adornment, the black-and-white film highlighting the textures and shapes of both, the models often mirroring the sharp angles of the construction. He plays on the contrast too, inserting moments of softness, in which a soft fleshiness emerges as against the hard severity of the concrete (these are the weakest images in the book, the models sometimes modeling too much, the formal concerns eschewed in favor of a more commercial image).

The book drips with death. The nude simultaneously exudes a sense of vitality and also finality: the cadaver is nude as well. The more formalist the composition, the more the body becomes, like the cadaver, mere material. But it is this not-quite-complete approach towards that pole that reflects life through its inchoate absence, negatively restoring its presence, but a presence indelibly touched by its brush with nullity.

Two things were happening in Los Angeles in the year Little began shooting this series: the city was in the midst of a massive construction boom, mostly in the form of large office buildings, and the CDC was documenting the first cases of AIDS in the United States. According to the Foundation for AIDS Research (amFAR), by the end of 1981 there would be 159 reported cases of AIDS and zero reported deaths. By the end of 1985, when the series was completed, there would be 15,527 reported cases and 12,529 deaths. As Little notes in the postscript to the book, “by 1983, we all began to know people who were getting sick.” In the short opening text, curator Ryan Linkof writes that “as [Little] has poignantly noted, many of the subjects did not survive the lethal pandemic.”

The construction boom would collapse by the nineties, and many of the city’s downtown high-rise constructions would be left largely vacant. At the same time, the death toll would continue to rise as racism, homophobia, neglect, and austerity exacerbated the crisis. The contrast between the setting and the models takes on a different meaning: what enraging waste. The construction boom coincided with the slashing of federal contributions to city budgets, only one of the forms of assault in the long right-wing war against America’s urban centers (in the case of Los Angeles, the federal contribution to the city budget went from 18 percent in 1977 to just 2 percent by 1985, as the late Mike Davis notes in “Who Killed Los Angeles? A Political Autopsy”). At the same time, the wealth gap between inner cities and their suburban rings skyrocketed as jobs, capital, and the wealthy departed for less dense, and largely racially segregated surroundings, deepening the problems facing the cities.

The AIDS crisis of the eighties was a mostly urban phenomenon, and research has since demonstrated the coincidence of poverty and mortality. The construction boom and its rather rapid bust are not causal, but they reveal an abandonment of the urban poor and the marginalized, abandoned by the city and the federal government both caught up in a frenzy of foreign capital fueled optimism. The men photographed in these buildings, monuments to excess, emerge as both the spirit of the city and its bad conscience as well.

An evident camaraderie underlies Little’s book. “The models were friends and men I met through social connections. They trusted me,” Little explains in the postscript—the emptiness is keener because of it. The figure in the flooded room: the undershirt and the water make him look cold. The platform and wall jutting towards the camera shrink him in perspective. That stain: all that remains of so much youth. He faces away from it, looking low and left towards nothing in particular. His reflection in the dirty water is an elegy: where has everyone gone?