Without Sin, There Is No Glamour
Who wouldn’t like to be in Fedya Ili’s shoes – taking pictures of handsome naked men in great cities all around the world, then talking with the guys as well about their experiences as gay men in those cities?! I was fascinated with this concept from the moment I first learned about it. I then got in touch with Fedya and invited him to contribute to the German anthology “Mein schwules Auge / My Gay Eye” which I have been editing since 2006. The pictures he sent me were mostly taken in Buenos Aires, and amongst them was the perfect cover shot: a sexy bearded man wearing a funny crocheted bear cap that would look ridiculous on most men. However, oddly not on this very masculine Argentinian chap. You just want to meet him in person because he seems like such a fun, self-assured and modest guy. When I look at Fedya’s photos, I cannot help but wonder if they are all his lovers. These pictures are so intimate, but then there are so many of them. It’s kind of like how they used to say in San Francisco at the height of the gay movement: “So many men, so little time”.
The feeling of these photos and their corresponding interviews was not all that different from the stories of the men from Moscow, Berlin or Paris: it’s about self- acceptance, relationships, love, friendship, and family. I would rather argue: if people – young and old, children and adults - never see two men kissing or holding hands in public, how can it become normal for them? It will always be extraordinary and potentially abnormal and threatening to them.
When I read these interviews there seems to be certain schizophrenia: life for gay men in Buenos Aires looks both easy going and violent. A mix of the French joie de vivre and the aggressiveness of the Latin macho. I guess it may be the culture, and the gay men who were interviewed seem to take it simply as such. For myself, I find it a bit bewildering.
Fedya and I are both artists, editors, and travelers. Like art gypsies, we work wherever we are staying, at any given moment. Fedya grew up in Russia and I was raised in West Germany, right on the French border. Fedya belongs to a younger generation, but we probably had to fight a lot of the same battles. Growing up as a gay youth in the seventies in West Germany wasn’t that easy either, but I guess we were both lucky to be creative and adventurous. Fedya wants to discover the soul of each city that he takes residence in, and he does so by placing his naked models in iconic public places that can easily be identified with the city in question. Often these buildings and places are grandiose, and almost exclusively they are beautiful – as are his models. I wonder what would happen if the models or the places were not so beautiful, just plain and normal? Or perhaps if they were older?
I am curious to see how Fedya’s project is going to continue and evolve.
Rinaldo Hopf
artist, co-editor ‘Mein Schwules Auge’