bushnstache: Telephones

Few props place a physique photograph in its period quite as efficiently as a telephone. Shape, color, receiver and that long wandering cord immediately tell us when we are. More importantly, the phone gives the naked model something perfectly ordinary to do. He isn’t posing—at least in the fantasy. He just happens to be naked when somebody calls.

1. Rusty Drumon on the phone.

2. Rod Bauer talking into the receiver end in bed.

3. Scott Manley (reportedly Rod Bauer's best friend) on the end table on a yellow phone.

4. John Davidson on a white phone in bed.

And that ordinariness makes the photographs surprisingly intimate. Suddenly we aren’t simply looking at a model; we seem to have caught a man at home taking a call. Inevitably, other fantasies creep in too: phone sex, the “call boy,” the hotel-room rendezvous. Rick Faulkner in the phone booth pushes the joke almost literally into public view.

5. Vic Seipke on a rotary phone in a mid-century living room reported to be in a department store show room.

6. Helmut Riedmeier on the phone in the bathroom.

7. Colt star, Bob Birdsong, on a stool talking into a white phone. He looks concerned here.

8. Greg Anderson on an orange carpet talking on the phone.

By the time we reach Scorpio and the hotel/motel-room atmosphere of the final image, the telephone feels less like a prop than part of a story. Who is calling whom—and what happens after he hangs up? Sometimes a good prop doesn’t answer the question. It gives us one to play with.