The Photography of Tom of Finland
Famed illustrator took pictures to inspire his drawings
BY NICHOLAS BOSTON
Once upon a time, gay
men walked the streets
of New York and San
Francisco, alone and
in bands, clad in uniforms that
appropriated the roles and rubrics
of straight male aggression
and dominance. Their garb was
inspired by sundry military men
and blue-collar workers, and their
silhouettes and stances became
the vocabulary of urban gay masculinity.
Soon, these clones, as
some dubbed them, were cropping
up in the gay villages of other major
American cities, and eventually
elsewhere in North America
and western Europe, such as Amsterdam,
London, and Montreal.
Erotic, yes, but there was also
something clearly didactic and
pedagogical about this aesthetic.
Here were gay men teaching each
other and the straight world what
a gay man looked like.
One of the headmasters in this
schoolhouse of sexual stylization,
as queer theorist Judith Butler
would describe it, was an artist
named Touko Laaksonen (1920-
1991), better known as Tom of
Finland. Laaksonen’s explicit
drawings of men bulging out of uniforms,
leather gear and work duds,
many carousing and copulating in
pairs and groups, committed gay
bodies to the pages of magazines
that circulated in the international
gay subculture beginning in the
1950s. Over the ensuing decades,
his illustrations swelled in appeal
and acclaim, making the art of
Tom of Finland a genre onto itself,
displayed in art galleries and held
in the collections of some of the
world’s foremost museums.
Now, on the centenary of Laaksonen’s
birth, Fotografi ska, New
York presents the exhibition, “Tom
of Finland, The Darkroom” from
April 30 to August 20.
Tom of Finland is known as an
illustrator. But, he also took photographs
to inspire his drawings.
Hence the premise of this exhibition
— it is the fi rst to frame Tom of
Finland as a photographer. Out of
Untitled (Val Martin), 1984, Tom of Finland Permanent Collection.
Untitled, 1986, Tom of Finland Permanent Collection.
necessity in sexually repressive Finland
of the 1950s, Laaksonen set up
a darkroom in a closet of his home
in Helsinki to develop the racy photographs
he took of men. These images,
being not only pornographic
but homoerotic, were outlawed at
the time, and he couldn’t entrust the
negatives to anyone else to develop
FOTOGRAFISKA AND NICK BOSTON
PHOTO FOTOGRAFISKA AND NICK BOSTON
for him. Even after developing the
prints, Laaksonen destroyed several
to protect the subjects in them, most
of whom were his friends and lovers.
“The Darkroom” presents photographs
and photographic collages
that have never been publicly displayed.
“I feel really humbled that we
GALLERY
were able to show a totally different
side of this very well-known
artist,” said Berndt Arell, the exhibition’s
curator, in a virtual
walkthrough of the show when it
was fi rst unveiled last year at Fotografi
ska Stockholm.
The exhibition visualizes Laaksonen’s
long history of international
interaction that greatly informed
the Tom of Finland oeuvre. Raised
by schoolteacher parents in rural
Finland, he served in the Finnish
army during World War II and
“had a lot of sex with a lot of soldiers”
from among the occupying
German and Russian troops, said
Arell. “It was a fetishism about uniforms
— that they are very masculine
and very handsome. He really
loved them. All kind of uniforms.”
Later, Laaksonen drew inspiration
from American bodybuilding
magazines and, in time, leather
fetish gear.
The fi rst images in the show the
visitor encounters are photographic
portraits Laaksonen and Robert
Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), the New
York-based gay photographer also
immersed in underground gay aesthetics,
took of each other in 1976.
Mapplethorpe was an admirer of
Tom of Finland’s artwork and traveled
to Helsinki to have Laaksonen
draw his own portrait. The photos
Laaksonen took of Mapplethorpe
on which to base his drawing, also
displayed, detail the collaboration
between two of gay visual culture’s
most important artists.
There are several portraits in
“The Darkroom” of Laaksonen’s
intimates and confi dants, including
one of Arno, Laaksonen’s favorite
muse. Laaksonen based his
fi guration of the archetypal Tom of
Finland character on Arno’s aesthetic,
attitude, and physique.
In the photograph, “Arno is wearing
all the fetishist details that interests
Tom,” Arell points out. “Like
the leather boots, the uniform
shirt and the harness and the cap,
of course. And the moustache. Everything.
He’s perfect. This is really
Tom’s man.” The shadow Arno’s
➤ TOM OF FINLAND, continued on p.39
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