I recently picked up a copy of Vince Aletti’s The Drawer from Self Publish Be Happy/MACK, a title released last year that won the 2023 Aperture Photobook award. At the time, I knew about the book. Still, I had not picked it up as I was unsure of what I could add to it, being that from the outside and with the press release in mind, the book seemed to be related to LGBTQ motifs, themselves fine enough a topic, but not something I feel overly qualified to speak on. I gravitate away from identity-related motifs as I do not find them particularly universal. That last statement might chafe, but from my position, it would be equally unfair to imagine all of the cultural experiences (great and awful) that go into these works to extract a criticality of the work assembled with little basis from which to do so.

I also avoid books that rely on eros as a way to communicate, as there isn’t much to say about the topic, no matter the persuasion of that discussion. I need something more to bring myself to the table. In the same category, but with iterative nuance, I have covered and enjoyed work by Mark Armijo McKnight, Mark Morrisroe, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Peter Hujar. Of course, this reads like my gay ally bonafide, but it is not meant to. Each of those artists works in the mode of eros, but also thanatos, and their perspective on death, decay, and the body in question make their work particularly fascinating for me. It scratches that Christian upbringing itch, the St. Sebastian’s, and so on. It also absolves me for fumbling with my inability to express much emotion or clarity of presence about fucking.

In the case of The Drawer, I was wrong not to have picked it up earlier as the book is an incredible collection of pictures within pictures, and the genius of the book is semi-autobiographical as Aletti, an obsessed collector and passionate writer about photography is not simply assembling images referring to his his predilections. He is very focused on the beauty of the image, both sexual and other, and what shines through most is his deep devotion to seeing. The Drawer is a collection of magazine images that might be considered a collection of tear sheets. These images, torn from mass market magazines, both pornographic and quotidian, remind me of Larry Clark’s epic vitrine frames for The Perfect Childhood that outline a complicated type of male beauty gazing, one that is both longing but also murderous.

In Aletti’s case, the murder is kept at bay, and The Drawer seethes with a type of desire but pulls back far enough to look at the male body nearly analytically. I mention this as I can’t quite spot Aletti’s type as one can with many homoerotic ventures. For example, Bruce Weber. For Example, the eros side of Robert Mapplethorpe. Etc. In Aletti’s book, he is speaking more to the broader history of the male nude image. There are images from artists like Peter Hujar, Wilhelm von Gloeden, John Dugdale, and others peppering the pages. It is, in this, somewhat analytical. He is also interested in a much broader conversation and the book is wide in the types of images he has assembled i.e. it is not all related to gay lifestyle choices, though the majority is.

All this said, what I very much love about The Drawer is not the male body nor the implied, but tame eroticism-bit of cum here and there wet-plastered to lips exhausted. I love that mass-market images illustrate Aletti’s love of the medium. His magpie tendencies for images reaching past the perfect into the realms of the mass-produced. All things being equal, the publications and their arrangement become collages or mini-exhibitions depending on how you look at them, and they remind me of scrapbooks of yore, an essential way for individuals to collect, obsess, and arrange images on a personal level for the preservation of their private desires. Often, these scrapbooks are illustrated with cinematic stills or well-known personalities of the day. When artists use the material, as outlined in Matthieu Orléan’s excellent Scrapbooks exhibition and catalog, published by Delpire & Co last year, we enter into a different rapport between the personal and the mass media image. We enter at a nexus between the world of the overly seen to the world of the deeply personal and seldom seen (in a different context), yet the image used function sin both.

The final note I would like to mention about this wonderful assortment and collage of a collection is the destructive act that needs to be taken care of to create such a volume of images. Though most of the images themselves remain intact to a degree, rescuing them from the pretense of the full-blown act of collage, they have been rent, dislocated, and dissected from a larger corpus of images in magazines, a format that Aletti is known for collecting. As such, tearing apart something one feels a passion toward to reinvent parts of its presence, like a relic elsewhere in a new body of light, is Catholic in tendency, a resurrection to ponder. I am sure there is a cliche in here about killing what you love, but I will leave it for the magpies.

Vince Aletti

The Drawer

Self Publish Be Happy/MACK