Rick Day Puts the Athletic Male Form Front and Center
New York-based photographer Rick Day released his coffee-table book Players in 2009, building an entire visual world around the athletic male form, sports imagery and a very deliberate amount of skin.
Published by Bruno Gmünder, the 144-page book turns familiar locker-room and playing-field cues into something far more polished and provocative. Athletic bodies, sports gear, underwear and stripped-back portraiture all become part of Day’s study of masculinity and display.
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Rick Day’s Players
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Players is a celebration of the athletic male body, pairing stripped-back portraiture with sports gear, underwear and jockstraps. But Day’s own framing goes a little further: the photographer said he wanted the project to blur lines around sexuality and let viewers lose themselves in beauty and lust.
The result is unapologetically physical, but it is also highly styled. Day uses the language of sports photography and fashion advertising, then strips away just enough of the uniform to make the body itself the subject.
Nearly a year after the book’s release, Players still feels like exactly the kind of photography project that belongs in the INYIM archive: confident, glossy, a little cheeky and completely committed to the male form.
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A selection of images from Rick Day’s 2009 Players photography project follows below.
Source: Players by Rick Day, Bruno Gmünder, 2009. This archived INYIM post was restored and reformatted for readability.
