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These fascinating, colourised versions of three Royale Studio photos showing two Guardsmen wrestling, bare-top were kindly submitted to me by Roo Morgan. The colouring transforms these images. The flesh tones draw in the eye, promising erotic interest, which is there if you care to look - the hand placed on the one man's raised buttock , the forearm embedded in the other's own crotch and as for the hidden head, we can only surmise what that is doing. Their interlocking itself is supremely intimate
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The uniforms these men are wearing are genuine and Roo has given them authentic colours persuading us that these are real soldiers, real Guardsmen, which they probably were. Men chosen to represent the heights of maleness and strength in our society. The wrestling scenario amplifies those manly characteristics and these two even have tattoos, a badge of uncultured maleness in the 60's, not a fashion.
Royale's predilection for real servicemen gave their images a thrilling tang of reality. Making them strip and touch each other in erotically interesting zones like buttocks, implied that the manly veneer conferred by their uniform concealed undercurrents of bold, homo-erotic desire. In this picture the hint of physical domination and submission to intimacy seems to epitomise that.
It subverted the whole military service ethos of obedience, discipline and working together.
No wonder the establishment was alarmed.
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These images show the two Guardsmen in undignified poses, not the sort of image to command the respect their superiors would want of the Services. The upraised bottom and open crotch are hugely suggestive sexually, distasteful even today and socially unacceptable then. There's already a suggestion of mutual embracing here but these two, carefully contrived poses only need to shift a little horizontally to become a simulation of oral sex. A typical example of 60's hidden eroticism which gay men would spot but would go over the head of the average 'man on the Clapham omnibus'.
If you haven't visited the new Royale Studio Blog and Gallery yet I encourage you to do so.
There are several new or upgraded posts there that have never appeared here:
Sailors Wrestling in the Rigging - expanded from one picture to four.
Peter George in Underwear (the missing PUN-1?)
Peter George's Storyettes (new list)
Peter Watts tied to the rigging (new information)
Plus a whole series of posts about Royale and how they operated
and index of forthcoming storyettes.
~
I welcome any feedback (via comments)
about how you find the design of the new site
3 comments:
Am I misremembering it or did I once read that many (most?) of the Royale/Hussar photoshoots were in colour but sold commercially as b/w?
For these pics I recognise the Photoshop colorising filter at work, especially making weird purple shadows. The AI technology is coming on in leaps and bounds but not quite perfected yet. But great to see these.
Yes, your memory is correct, according to the Colville exhibition blurb, the original images were colour slides but only black and white prints were sold, for cost reasons I suppose. At this time, most ordinary magazines were b/w but the newspaper sunday supplements in colour were about to transform the economics.
A pedant writes: these riding booted soldiers are Troopers/Hussars rather than (Foot-)Guardsmen. And sexy as hell,thanks.
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