Roy Blakey, Quintessential Photographer of Men & Dance, Dies at 94
As famous as he was for his classic "Mandate" shoots, he was a devotee of dance and especially ice skating.
This forum has, so far, been devoted to long-form interviews, but I reserve the right to post other things of LGBTQ+ import — and sadly, that includes this too-brief obituary for the great Roy Blakey.
So sad to report that this legendary gay physique photographer — who just turned 94 last month — died of dementia complications on August 23, 2024.
His beloved niece, filmmaker Keri Pickett, described his passing on Facebook as “peaceful and perfect,” which could also be a descriptor for his voluminous work. One hopes his countless photo shoots are as safely preserved somewhere as I know his world-famous ice-skating memorabilia collection is.
Pickett had worked on a doc, Uncle Roy, in order to document Roy’s memories as they faded.
I spoke to him briefly two years ago as I prepared my long Mandate history for Esquire. I reminded him he was groundbreaking, and he said, “Oh, really? [Laughs] Well, thank you.” He sounded happy, but he remembered very little of his work for the magazine and its offshoots, in spite of photographing many of its best covers and layouts in the early days.
In truth, the magazine and its offshoots owed a huge debt to his aesthetic — it is impossible to overstate his influence on how men came to see other men in the 1970s.
“Well, there were a lot of lovely models,” he told me simply, and humbly.
When he moved to NYC in the ‘60s, he wound up in a studio over a titty bar in Chelsea, where he worked for decades.
“Even in the late 1960s,” he told writer Scott Harrah when he was about 70, “photographing naked men was considered a taboo. I felt it was a magnificent subject that had been ignored for much too long, and began to experiment to see what I could do with it.”
To that end, he placed ads in The Village Voice trading headshots for nudes, describing the replies being like “ripples spreading out in a pond.”
By 1973, he had show at the Continental Baths. The New York Times reviewed it with the following observation:
“Militant feminists can now relax. At least, they can relax if they think that two wrongs make a right. Because photographers are now exploiting men as well as women by transforming them into sex objects … So far as is possible, they transform the young male body into an esthetic rather than a sexual object. Something to be looked at but not touched. A dancer's fantasy, perhaps, or a narcissist's.”
Charming, no? Yet in spite of this kind of absolutely backward thinking, Blakey photographed incessantly and obsessively until 1991, which he had had, and had perhaps given, enough.
Roy Blakey’s ‘70s Male Nudes (written with his close friend Reed Massengill, who likened Blakey’s work to that of a Dutch Master painter) was published just over 10 years later, in 2002, and offers an excellent look at some of his dreamy, crisp, brilliantly realized photos, many of which were on display in his 2002 one-man show Men Wearing Only Like at the Leslie-Lohman Gallery
If you can track it down, his 1972 book He was one of the first art books filled with male nudes, and it is considered a classic — and collectible — work to this day.
Blakey was a fantastic photographer, and he became a major devotee of ice skating, particularly of the legacy of the great skater Sonja Henjie (1912-1969), the latter of which is captured in Pickett’s Netflix doc The Fabulous Ice Age (2013).
As he leaves the world a better place, I’m sending love to his many friends, fans and admirers, and especially to his niece, who from all accounts took such good care of him as he declined.
More on his ice-skating passion:
Thanks so much for writing about Roy whose zest for life only dimmed in his final days. His talents are still being revealed. Blessed to have shared studio space with him for over 30 years. More than uncle/niece we were friends. FYI Instagram re new film in development on Roy @uncleroyfilm
Roy could enthral me with his stories, taking me to another place in time like some "Twilight Zone" episode. He was magic in everything he did, in the way he lived his life. A wonderful man whose home in his studio was a wonderland.