Nicola and Manuel’s debut ebook appears to moments of tenderness in an exploration of the male gaze. “We found it interesting to see male bodies portrayed with an aura of mystery without being voyeuristic,” they are saying
Tall, slim and tender, the topics in pictures duo Nicola and Manuel’s debut ebook, Cat Tree, are a world away from the standard photos of burly, rugged masculinity. “Movies, fashion, and photography, are all complicit in making some representations more desirable than others,” asserts the Italian pictures duo over e-mail. “Sometimes even the smallest, most unconscious gestures, like the way one is sitting, or the thickness of a strap, speak volumes about the power relations of gender in daily life.”
The circumstances below which Cat Tree was conceived may be boiled right down to an opportunity encounter with Enrico, the expressive dark-haired “muse” that graces the duvet of their monograph. “It was a rainy day in Berlin and we invited him to take some pictures at our place,” says Nicola. “We had never met anyone so charming before. There is something timeless and contemporary at the same time about him; ageless, effortlessly insouciant and cheeky.” Clasping a furry scarf, or reclining towards padding wrapped in delicate clear plastic – in a single picture, towards Enrico’s pale tattooed pores and skin, he holds silver rings towards his nipples – the duo captures candid, relaxed pictures of their muse free of binaries, comfy and intimate.
It’s an intimacy that comes half and parcel with the duo’s observe. Nicola and Manuel began working collectively after they started seeing each other in 2019. Despite rising from completely different artistic backgrounds, with Nicola an artwork director and Manuel a make-up artist, they had been drawn to 1 one other by way of the similarities of their upbringings and identities. While now based mostly in Paris and Milan, they had been each introduced up in small cities within the north of Italy, the place nature grows undisturbed towards the nonetheless and monotonous city panorama, and it was by way of pictures that they discovered their medium to interrupt up the tedium and isolation. “Somehow these ‘non-binary’ places without a defined identity informed our visions, drawing our interest towards the in-between state of things,” says Nicola. “A vibration rather than a permanent state.”
Following their photos of Enrico, the duo enlisted a bigger forged, discovering ten different “muses” in complete to fill the 68 pages of their monograph – together with Eddie, a cat. “Although the book is quite paratactical in its sequence of portraits and moments, there is a subtle fil rouge that guides the eye, almost as if the characters and the cats are the same entity,” they are saying. Graceful, elegant, whereas ostensibly self-dependent with their slick, I-know-what-I-want angle, the feline attract may be traced again to historical Egypt the place they had been extremely revered and related to the goddess Bastet. “We feel the image production about male bodies has always been moving in the same few directions: the celebration of male nudity and the obsession with youth,” they are saying. “We found it interesting to see male bodies portrayed with an aura of mystery, without being voyeuristic.”
While trend pictures forges a brand new path that presents gender identification as malleable and performative for the digicam, with it comes an growth in direction of new nuances and acceptance in masculinity; Nicola and Manuel’s pictures speaks to a neighborhood that lives these nuances freely. “Simone de Beauvoir once said ‘On ne naît pas femme, on le devient.’ It means that a ‘woman’ is something you become, it’s something you construct,” the duo say. “Biological differences are real, but culturally speaking, the way of being ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in the world is a performance of acts and mannerisms. You can create your own version of it, which may be an integration of both.”
Cat Tree by Nicola and Manuel is out now.
