Brian: A Nine-Year Photographic Diary

 In a unique photographic diary that spans nine years and several cities, photographer Reed Massengill has chronicled the coming of age of his model and friend Brian Hess, a very handsome and charismatic young man. Massengill began photographing Brian in 1992 in Knoxville, Tennessee, shortly after Brian's high school graduation. During the intervening years, as the photographer and model became friends, Massengill's portraits of Brian documented his radical physical transformation. His hair was bleached, shaved and re-grown several times. Tattoos, piercings and scarifications further adorned his body and dramatically altered his appearance from year to year. Massengill's portraits have ranged from pensive and introspective to playful and wildly erotic.

Reed Massengill is a widely published writer and photographer who was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1961. He graduated in 1984 from The University of Tennessee, where he majored in journalism.

As a writer, he is the author of the critically acclaimed Portrait of a Racist (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), a biography of white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, who was convicted in 1994 of the 1963 assassination of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Portrait was nominated by its publisher for the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1994 and was reissued in trade paperback in 1997. His most recent non-fiction book, Becoming American Express, was a lavish history commissioned by the company and published in nine languages to celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2000.

Brian: A Nine-Year Photographic Diary is the third monograph of his male nudes, following the success of Massengill (St. Martin’s Press, 1996) and Massengill Men (Bruno Gmünder Verlag, 1997). His images have also been included in a number of important photographic anthologies including Beasts, Uniforms and Male Bonding Volume II (FotoFactory Press, 1997, 1998) and Exposed (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000).

He is an avid collector of vintage male physique photography, and has spent the past decade amassing an important archive of work by some of the great masters of the genre.

© 2000, FotoFactory Press