Adart Book

For twenty-five years, a handful of independent magazines have reinvented the way men are photographed, often far from smoothed-out bodies and professional models.

BUTT, founded in Amsterdam in 2001 by Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom, paved the way by publishing portraits by Wolfgang Tillmans in its very first issue, printed on its famous pink paper. Love, launched in 2015 by Liam Campbell, dedicates each issue to a city and its inhabitants, who are photographed and invited to write their own texts. In London, Meat followed the same path: Adrian Lourie published fifty-six issues there in ten years and photographed more than six hundred men, without retouching and without casting. Boys ! Boys ! Boys !, directed by gallery owner Ghislain Pascal, defends queer photography as an artistic practice in its own right. Kink, published in Germany twice a year for more than twenty years, brings the same demands to a rawer aesthetic: a taut photography, attentive to the vulnerability as much as the sensuality of its subjects.

In France too, voices have emerged. Exterface, the Parisian duo formed by Julien and Stéphane, has been building a saturated and theatrical masculine iconography for over ten years. Tale of Men publishes its own photographic fanzines, in a softer, more narrative vein.

Adart Book follows in this lineage, with its own difference. A French magazine, made in Paris, entirely self-published.