Man: An American Assay

Boy Scout Jamboree 2000, Virginia

Prom, St. John Newman's School for Boys, Pennsylvania

These images are the fruit of Ken Graves and Eva Lipman's decade-long inquiry into the rituals that mark the production of masculinity in late-capitalist America. They are a testament to the energies generated, and always incompletely incorporated, by liberal governmentality. In these photographs, such energies are brought starkly into view by the surplus—that something excessive—produced in the investment of subjects in, and by, liberalism's signature institutions and corporeal practices. Investigating sites of civic involvement and voluntary association, of pedagogical and military discipline, and the private obsessions of leisure and sport, rendered public in spectacle and its commodification, this work understands bodies—organized in affectively heightened, highly codified action—as points of ingress into social imaginaries.

Graduation, Valley Forge Military Academy, Pennsylvania

Beginning with a collection that traced the mimetic resonances between the culture of boxing and the high school prom, Graves and Lipman went on to shoot at military academies, boot camps, Boy Scout jamborees, demolition derby meets, strip clubs, wrestling and Ultimate Fighting competitions, rodeos, and Promise Keepers conventions, from 1993 to 2001. Their images expose the sodalities of class and gender that flourish in the face of atomization and alienation; the celebration of excess, waste, risk, and violence in the face of liberalism's call for industry, economy, civility, and bland sociability; the revenant of homoerotic desire at the point of heterosexual masculinity's most forceful articulation; the qualities of sacrifice, devotion, and religious ecstasy that attend these most secular of rites. Graves and Lipman anatomize rituals, forms of play, and practical accomplishments that stage, but do not resolve, the tensions between competition and cooperation and self and solidarity at the heart of the capitalist project of

above Boy Scout Jamboree 2000, Virginia

below Wrestlers, Pennsylvania

above Graduation, Valley Forge Military Academy, Pennsylvania

below Wrestlers, Pennsylvania

masculine individualism. The desire for cathartic release in the extremity of competition and the drive toward regulative containment are revealed as flip sides of the same phenomenal coin, the magic that sets a collective body in motion.

Cultural critics rather than ethnographers or documentarians, Graves and Lipman present such rites as more than the brute facts of masculine sociality. Their images document the myriad ways people inhabit structures of practical discipline and affective release with irony, longing, obsession, surrender, insouciance, devotion, self-aversion, physical ecstasy, and extraordinary passion. Graves and Lipman use the photograph to capture accidental conjunctions of visual elements, to isolate moments of ill-fittedness, misperformance, unguarded excess, or aesthetic anomaly. It is here, where subjects are somehow "off-line," that the lineaments of desire—unpredictable, ephemeral, volatile—reveal themselves.

U.S. Marine Corps, Basic Training, Parris Island, North Carolina

U.S. Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, Illinois

Ultimate Fighters, Fort Wayne, Indiana

Demolition Derby Driver, Pennsylvania

High School Prom, Pennsylvania