The Guardian published a gallery titled Muscles, metrosexuals and male tears: the 39 pictures that changed the way we see men (for good and for bad), introduced by Luke Kennard, collecting 39 images that shifted visual ideas of masculinity. The selection ranges from body-building Eugen Sandow and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Hulk Hogan and a photo of David Bowie in a dress, and it includes the wartime “weeping Frenchman” and Paul Gascoigne’s tears at the 1990 World Cup. Kennard invokes John Berger’s line that men act while women appear and cites Judith Butler calling masculinity a phantasm to argue these images expose the fiction of invulnerability. The gallery highlights work such as Karen Knorr’s photographs satirising privileged male postures in gentlemen’s clubs. Kennard notes a persistent emphasis on super-jacked male bodies across media and an absence of the roughly 80 percent of men with average, softer body types. The essay’s concrete point is that photographs can either reinforce or challenge historical associations of how men behave, dress, and project power, and these 39 pictures map those competing histories.
