Greg Gorman: Just Between Us

by Greg Gorman

Over the last two decades, photographer Greg Gorman has carved out a classically refined style that is uniquely his own. In his portraits of Streisand, DiCaprio, De Niro, and Travolta, his fine art work, and his major ad campaigns, Gorman’s images suggest a mastery of the medium that few have rivaled. Continuing his exploration of the male nude, Just Between Us is a highly charged work focused exclusively on one model. During a year of shooting, an unusually collaborative relationship evolved between artist and subject. What unfolds is a photographic narrative unfettered by convention — a bold compilation of images unmatched for its candor and sexuality. 250 photographs are featured.

Genres: Photography

224 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2002

Reviews

[Pamela Langhorne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorious. That's the best way to describe this lush, image-heavy entry from acclaimed photographer Greg Gorman. Whereas Gorman is best known for his celebrity portraits and ad campaigns, this beautiful black & white coffee table book concentrates fully on just one model, also named Greg. With smoldering eyes and thick pillowy lips, Greg the model looks like the much more tattooed younger brother of Brad Pitt—with a face and body made for fashion layouts and magazine covers. But whereas Pitt has parlayed his universal sexual attractiveness into a lucrative career in the art of the sensual celluloid tease, Gorman strips his Greg down to the basest of elements to reveal the libidinous man behind the sultry beauty.

Never before has such open desirability been put on display quite so blatantly as it is in this appealing book. Here's Greg glowering into the camera like a Calvin Klein model; smiling joyously on location in such exotic places as Ireland, Rome, Paris and Monaco; and unabashedly caressing his large sculpted cock, through all its various levels of flaccidity, arousal and oozing, well-lubed erection. Here is beauty made carnally accessible. The Abercrombie & Fitch whack fantasy finally captured with its pants down around its ankles where they belong and reveling in all its sweaty, hormonal, fully-realized promise.

Though it isn't hard to imagine a year spent doggedly trailing the magnificent specimen of masculine energy we come to know as Greg, Just Between Us does raise questions concerning Gorman's actual role in the "partnership." After all, getting a model to strip naked for the camera is about as hard as a 19-year-old turning tricks at a truck stop, but convincing that model to slip an oversized dildo slowly and fully up his ass, all the while pouting for the lens, is another story altogether. How, one wonders, does a photographer reach such a level of intimacy with his model that all propriety is completely stripped away? How, indeed.

There's never any question that Greg is on display for the viewer. Whether that viewer was the camera, or the man behind it, is a mystery which may go forever unsolved, except in the deepest, darkest, dankest recesses of the fertile, forever carnally curious mind. And isn't that what fantasy, particularly sexual fantasy, is all about? One look at Greg, as captured by Greg, will be all the answer you need. Take my word for it, Just Between Us is essential bedside "reading" at its most salaciously sublime.

[Mark Oliveri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proof that b&w photography still has a place in the world. It somehow slows things down so to enjoy the model more then if in color.