105 photographs chosen by staff at Aperture Magazine (or maybe just Vince Aletti — it’s not quite clear) on the theme
of gender. There are some wonderful images here. But what possessed
the publisher to ask Vince Aletti to write an introduction and
do an interview with Madonna is beyond me. Presumably Madonna
fans may be interested in what she has to say, but she has nothing
interesting to say to anyone else. Of course, she is an artist
in her own rite, as a performer whose work has thematized issues
of gender, and she published her book of photographs, Sex,
to little critical acclaim. She is rich and sponsors the work
of female photographers. She is not brain dead. But she doesn’t
have anything interesting to say about gender or photography in
this interview.

Maybe it was the drugs. She had just been under gas at the dentist,
before the interview. Maybe that was a clue that it wasn’t a good
time to do an interview. Maybe it was the interviewer. A former
music critic, he is, or at least was in 1999, the photo critic
of the Village Voice. He writes a couple of pages as an
introduction to the book, but they are of no consequence. There’s
an extremely self-indulgent piece listing 200 women by Wayne Koestenbaum.
Don’t bother with it.

So, of course, the pictures must speak for themselves. The first
half are men, the second half are women. There’s a few familiar
faces — rock stars, politicians, celebrity figures, and several
well-known photographs. There are probably more from the 1990s
than any other decade, and the earliest images are from the 1920s.
There’s Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Andy Warhol, Sylvia Plachy,
Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, and many more lesser known and
just as interesting photographers represented here.

The arrangement of photographs seems random, as does the choice.
It’s a bunch of images carelessly thrown together in a coffee-table
book. It’s fun to browse these images, and if you want to learn
the names of some interesting photographers, you could probably
do so by taking notes when looking at this book. That’s the best
use I can think of for Malefemale.

This review first appeared online Sept 1, 2001

Categories: General, Sexuality, Artandphotography

Tags: Gender Issues and Sexual Disorders, Gay, Lesbian and Bisexuality Resources