![]() ![]() In 2017, it was relaunched by the Bob Mizer Foundation featuring a mix of legacy Mizer photographs and contemporary photographers' work. The magazine finished its original run in 1990. Scholar Christopher Nealon described the magazine as having become "more of a catalog for wrestling and bondage videos" by the 1980s. Starting in 1969, Physique Pictorial ceased to operate as a physique magazine, and instead switched to fully nude photographs. Physique publications rapidly fell out of popularity in the late 1960s as new legal precedent allowed magazines to print full-frontal nudity. Author Jeffrey Escoffier speculates that this was because Mizer served time in prison that year on charges of running a prostitution operation. There was a gap in the magazine's run covering most of the year 1968. PICTORIAL MAGAZINE FREEWhile the first issue was a free eight page booklet, subsequent issues increased in size, with additional full-page photographic prints, and in 1952 the price was increased first to fifteen cents, then to twenty-five. Mizer contended that this title was more apt since, in addition to physique photography, the magazine also included artwork by artists such as George Quaintance. Six months later, the magazine was rebranded Physique Pictorial. The first issue of Mizer's magazine was published in May 1951 under the title Physique Photo News. This led Mizer to the idea of founding his own magazine, devoted to physique photography designed for a gay audience. Subsequently, the US Post Office pressured Strength & Health to cease running advertisements for physique photographs, threatening to revoke its second-class mailing permit. Mizer was prosecuted for distributing obscenity through the mail, and sentenced to a year on a prison farm. In 1947, he began advertising his photographs in the back pages of the bodybuilding magazine Strength & Health, along with other gay physique photographers of the time. īob Mizer began his work as a physique photographer in the early 1940s, photographing young men at Muscle Beach. Physique Pictorial was published in Los Angeles by Mizer's Athletic Model Guild, an ersatz modeling agency that provided cover for the publishing of the magazine, and the sale of photographs and film strips through the magazine. The magazine also served as a venue for homoerotic artists including Touko Laaksonen (as Tom of Finland), George Quaintance, and Dom Orejudos (as "Etienne"), and was a predecessor to later overtly homosexual publications. The pages of Physique Pictorial primarily featured the photography of Bob Mizer, who also served as the magazine’s publisher and editor, consisting of black and white photos of athletic young men, either nude or nearly so. ![]() ![]() During its run from 1951 to 1990 as a quarterly publication, it exemplified the use of bodybuilding culture and classical art figure posing, as a cover for homoerotic male images, and to evade charges of obscenity. Physique Pictorial is an American magazine, one of the leading beefcake magazines of the mid-20th century. Physique Pictorial, volume 5 number 2, Summer 1955 ![]()
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