Book Preview: Michael Stokes "Exhibition"

Publishing house Bruno Gmünder and photographer Michael Stokes have teamed up for not one, but two new books out this November. We previewed the jaw dropping Always Loyal a few weeks ago. Now it is our absolute pleasure to talk about the second book coming out, Exhibition. Available as of November 15th, Exhibition is a 136-page, large scale, hardcover volume, showcasing male erotic images and figure studies of fitness competitors, personal trainers, and body builders from around the world. And as you will see from the images below, it is pretty astonishing.

Raised in Berkeley, California, Michael Stokes is now a Los Angeles based photographer. He graduated first in his class and Phi Beta Kappa with a Fine Art degree through the film department at California State University, Long Beach. Before changing his career path to filmmaking, he was a photography major, learning pre-digital photographic techniques and using darkrooms and silver gelatin film. In film school, he wrote and directed a short film, Alien, that screened in film festivals around the world.

Michael’s first coffee table book, Masculinity (2012), was a glamour-styled, photographic male figure study book that is currently out of print. In the same style as his first, his second book, Bare Strength (2014), is already in its third printing and is available on Amazon. It features a chapter on wounded veterans of war, specifically amputees. From the sales of this book, he has donated $10,000 to the Semper Fi Fund, a charity that benefits veterans of war and their families. Also in 2014, Michael collaborated with the publisher Taschen to produce My Buddy, supplying the publisher with his collection of vintage photos of nude WWII soldiers.

Michael’s photos of wounded veterans have been shared around the world and have been featured on television: Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Tonight Show,The View, and The Talk. They have been featured in several major newspapers and online periodicals around the world, including: The Independent UK, The Mirror UK, TheDrudge Report, The Huffington Post, The Huffington Post (French Edition), Cosmopolitan, People magazine, BuzzFeed, and Vanity Fair Italy, just to mention a few.

Visit Michael Stokes at his Website or Facebook. Preorder a copy of Exhibition from publisher Bruno Gmünder or from Amazon!

Book Preview: Michael Stokes "Always Loyal"

Publishing house Bruno Gmünder has teamed up with wonderful photographer Michael Stokes once again for the jaw dropping, incredibly moving new book Always Loyal. Inspired by a chapter in his 2014 book, Bare Strength, which featured wounded amputee Marines, Always Loyal is an entire photographic volume dedicated to U.S. Gulf War veterans showcasing the beautiful side of wounded soldiers, whose injuries and/or lost limbs are detailed in intimate, exclusive photographs. The goal of fitness photographer Stokes, who was inspired by a shoot with veteran and amputee Alex Minsky, was to put a different spin on how wounded veterans were depicted. The result of the book is pure art.

Raised in Berkeley, California, Michael Stokes is now a Los Angeles-based photographer. He graduated first in his class and Phi Beta Kappa with a Fine Art degree through the film department at California State University, Long Beach. Before changing his career path to filmmaking, he was a photography major, learning pre-digital photographic techniques and using darkrooms and silver gelatin film. In film school, he wrote and directed a short film, Alien, that screened in film festivals around the world.

Michael’s first coffee table book, Masculinity (2012), was a glamour-styled, photographic male figure study book that is currently out of print. In the same style as his first, his second book, Bare Strength (2014), is already in its third printing and is available on Amazon. It features a chapter on wounded veterans of war, specifically amputees. From the sales of this book, he has donated $10,000 to the Semper Fi Fund, a charity that benefits veterans of war and their families. Also in 2014, Michael collaborated with the publisher Taschen to produce My Buddy, supplying the publisher with his collection of vintage photos of nude WWII soldiers.

Michael’s photos of wounded veterans have been shared around the world and have been featured on television: Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Tonight Show,The View, and The Talk. They have been featured in several major newspapers and online periodicals around the world, including: The Independent UK, The Mirror UK, TheDrudge Report, The Huffington Post, The Huffington Post (French Edition), Cosmopolitan, People magazine, BuzzFeed, and Vanity Fair Italy, just to mention a few.

Visit Michael Stokes at his Website or Facebook. Preorder a copy of Always Loyal from publisher Bruno Gmünder or from Amazon!

Book Preview: Michael Stokes "Bare Strength"

In 2012, Michael Stokes released Masculinity, a coffee table photography book featuring the male form. It kind of took the world by storm and his work was featured on mainstream television shows such as Good Morning America, The Today Show, and Jay Leno.

Well, thanks to German publisher Bruno Gmünder, Michael Stokes is back with an amazing new coffee table book Bare Strength. Once again, the book features the raw beauty of the male physique. While some photos are a bit more than mildly erotic, the book is really more of a testament to the stunning, artistic vision of the photographer. 

Bare Strength is broken into photographic collections. For example, the opening chapter is Classic Bare, a collection of exquisite photographs paying homage to classical poses from historical paintings or earlier eras of erotic photography. Other chapters include Athletes or Barely Dressed. But, by far, the best section of the book is the titular chapter Bare Strength. In this chapter, Stokes captures astonishingly beautiful photographs of military men and their amputations, sometimes with their artificial limbs, sometimes without. The photos are truly jaw dropping. Michael also makes sure to help contribute to the Semper Fi Fund, which helps care for injured soldiers and their families.

In the preface to Bare Strength, Michael Stokes writes:

I’ve often heard my photos described as homoerotic, but at this time the majority of the people that follow my work are women. So, if a heterosexual woman is viewing an image of a nude heterosexual man, how is this homoerotic? The answer might lie with the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who coined the term the “male gaze.” Mulvey‘s central thesis is that the voyeur or spectator is traditionally male and derives visual pleasure from a dominant and controlling perspective, while the female submits to the male gaze and is fetishized as the main sexual object. For many, the disruption of this convention is too much. And no doubt I knew this as a photography student. Along with Edward Weston’s seashells, I wish my college professor had shown us Minor White’s nudes. If I had the chance to do it all over, I would have loaded the print drying racks in my college darkroom with male erotica. Now I draw inspiration from our predecessors, and when my model asks me what he should wear, I say, “As little as possible.”

Right now, Bare Strength is exclusively available via Bruno Gmünder. It won't be released to any other book seller until mid to late 2015. However, if you like the pics below and want to look before you leap, you can check out a full preview of the book here. There is nudity, so you might not want to go there at work. You can check out more about Michael Stokes at his Website or Facebook page.