Lots of men manscape, or completely erase their pubic hair, now. It’s going to be so reassuring for a lot of men, particularly young men. Was she surprised by the variety? “Oh yeah, definitely. Often, their father’s penis was the first they had seen when they were young, and they found it intimidating. Not all felt inadequate, of course: she talks about how much she loved the man who compared his penis to a badly behaved uncle at a wedding, and the man who described his “as a barometer of my health” and wants “to put sex back on its pedestal”.ĭodsworth was amazed by how many found themselves talking about their fathers, in particular absent fathers, bad fathers, aggressive fathers. When you're a young black man, you experience inordinate focus on you as a sexual being What really moved me is how much that shame and inadequacy had bled into different parts of their life.” She says many were teased as children about their penis and never recovered from it. What surprised her most? “A lot more men feel a sense of shame or anxiety about their size, or an aspect of their performance, than I would have thought. “So there was something interesting about going through the process of separation and divorce from somebody I’d been with for 20 years, then meeting 100 men and stepping into this very intimate conversation with them all.” It was really lovely.” A couple of months before she started Manhood, Dodsworth split up with her husband, the father of her two sons. A few she had to actively search for: the vicar, former cancer patients, a man with a micro-penis.ĭid the project make her think differently about men? “Yes, there was a feeling of falling in love with men. You get a much better interview after the picture.” Dodsworth knew a few of the men, who are aged between 20 and 92, but most were strangers, found largely by word of mouth. Once somebody has bared their body, they are much more likely to bare their soul. “The photographs took only about 10 seconds, then I spent 30 to 60 minutes interviewing them. A few of the men look like self-satisfied alphas (we have to guess: we can’t see their faces), but most appear vulnerable in one way or the other, whether it’s their pose or the way they hold their hands.ĭoes Dodsworth remember her subjects by their penis or by their face? “Face,” she says instantly. The humanity lies in the relationship between these body parts. In each photo, you see penis and testicles, belly, hands and thighs. One word for penis is manhood, so it seemed a perfect starting point to talk about being a man.”ĭodsworth has now photographed 100 men. “I had this sense that men were in a ‘man box’ as much as I’d been in a ‘woman box’, and I wanted to get to know them better and hear their stories. And she has had a similar experience with Manhood. “You see lots of pictures of breasts everywhere and you can’t help feeling you don’t measure up.” When she talked to women, she discovered many of them could tell their life story through them. Like many of us, she says, she is uneasy with her own body. Breasts have been commodified and aestheticised, so we’re used to seeing them in everyday life the same cannot be said of penises, which remain largely unseen and very much taboo.ĭodsworth’s earlier project was personal. That was delicate, Dodsworth says, but not as delicate as this. In 2014’s Bare Reality, also previewed in Guardian Weekend, the photographer interviewed women about their relationship with their breasts. This is not Dodsworth’s first foray into body parts. There was something interesting about going through a divorce, then meeting 100 men in an intimate way
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