Champion

Rating:
Summary: Classic and timeless
Review: Champion is a beautiful visual history of Walter Kundzicz's career. The photographic reproductions are impeccable, the images timeless and classic. While the images themselves make this book worth the purchase, Kundzicz's introduction on his life and career is an added bonus. Be sure to read it. Using a brilliant wit and unapologetic frankness, he teaches us much about censorship, the power of the Religious Right, and the persecution homosexuals in the past have endured, paving the way for the freedom and tolerance often now taken for granted by the younger gay community.

Rating:
Summary: Classic and timeless
Review: Champion is a beautiful visual history of Walter Kundzicz's career. The photographic reproductions are impeccable, the images timeless and classic. While the images themselves make this book worth the purchase, Kundzicz's introduction on his life and career is an added bonus. Be sure to read it. Using a brilliant wit and unapologetic frankness, he teaches us much about censorship, the power of the Religious Right, and the persecution homosexuals in the past have endured, paving the way for the freedom and tolerance often now taken for granted by the younger gay community.

Rating:
Summary: Hypersexy
Review: Description from the publisher: "Champion Studio (Walter Kundzicz) defined male physique photography during the late 1950s and 1960s. His splashy photos of scantily clad athletes - with their props, costumes, and bulging posing pouches - are as vivid and hypersexy today as they were half a century ago."

Rating:
Summary: Hypersexy
Review: Description from the publisher: "Champion Studio (Walter Kundzicz) defined male physique photography during the late 1950s and 1960s. His splashy photos of scantily clad athletes - with their props, costumes, and bulging posing pouches - are as vivid and hypersexy today as they were half a century ago."

Rating:
Summary: Oddly Moving
Review: It's not easy to say why these pictures are so affecting. Most of them show moderately good-looking young men in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during a crucial period just before the outbreak of the gay lib revolution. The models are photographed mostly standing or lying down, against ordinary backgrounds (one bathroom recurs very often), with simple props; most of them are nude or in skimpy posing straps. The physical type is also repetitive: muscular, but largely smooth and lithe (as it seems, "six-packs" hadn't been invented yet), well-groomed and, with only one exception, clean-shaven. Except in a few group photos, they are usually expressionless, rather than, say, overtly lascivious in the modern manner. The photos are a bit washed out, in the understated style of older pornography, but on the whole this book is leagues distant from modern porn.

What I kept thinking as I looked through it is that, for most of these men, a heroic age lay just on the horizon: Stonewall just a few years ahead, a time of profound sexual liberation. It's like they are pausing just before the battle begins.

This book is a fine document of a distant era, and well worth owning.

Rating:
Summary: This Book Is Aptly Named.
Review: This book reminds me-- I swear I'm telling the truth-- of Dolly Parton's "Hard Rock Christmas." Something tells me Ms. Parton would like this book if she saw it. If you own this book, you can have Christmas the whole year long. The words "sated" and "abundance of riches" come to mind in describing these photographs. There are approximately 350 pages here, beautifully reproduced in color, of sexy young men whom Walter Kundzicz photographed in the 1950's and 1960's. To avoid the clutches of "Big Brother" and get around the laws against nudity, Mr. Kundzicz posed many of his models in see-through posing straps. According to his interesting article here about Champion Studio, he was not always successful in avoiding prosecution, however, particularly from a police force heavily influenced by the Catholic Church. From what we know now, the church would have spent its time more productively "policing" its own. But that's another story. It's scary to see what the laws were and such a short time ago.

Kudos to Reed Massengill for, in the words of Mr. Kundzicz, "managing the publication" of this book and seeing to completion yet another fine book of male photographs. You'll return to this delicious book again and again for more candy!

Rating:
Summary: Bravo Wally!
Review: Wally Kundzicz took the bull by the horns & put together a tribute to himself using scans of small prints he had, Bravo! Despite his sometimes faulty memory, the nearly 80 year old photographer recalls his by-gone days of glory and documents his important place in the history of physique photography. His triumphs in court helped to end postal tyranny and did much to pave the way for today's Gay press. The book may be small, but the quality of the printing is outstanding. The size of the book is evocative of the Golden Age of physique photography, when prints and magazines were small format only, so that they would fit easily into a man's jacket pocket. Those were the days when we all lived in a backward, homophobic society in which the revelation that a man was Gay almost always resulted in the loss of his job and his home and his ostracization by his family and by "main stream" society.... or worse. The appropriately small size of the book recalls those anxious and repressive times, and is a good size to pop into a briefcase.
... Some words of warning, however: Wally's memory failed him from time to time, and he got some of the model's names wrong. (Who can blame him? All of those hunks would blow anybody's mind.) The official site has the correct names.

Rating:
Summary: Bravo Wally!
Review: Wally Kundzicz took the bull by the horns & put together a tribute to himself using scans of small prints he had, Bravo! Despite his sometimes faulty memory, the nearly 80 year old photographer recalls his by-gone days of glory and documents his important place in the history of physique photography. His triumphs in court helped to end postal tyranny and did much to pave the way for today's Gay press. The book may be small, but the quality of the printing is outstanding. The size of the book is evocative of the Golden Age of physique photography, when prints and magazines were small format only, so that they would fit easily into a man's jacket pocket. Those were the days when we all lived in a backward, homophobic society in which the revelation that a man was Gay almost always resulted in the loss of his job and his home and his ostracization by his family and by "main stream" society.... or worse. The appropriately small size of the book recalls those anxious and repressive times, and is a good size to pop into a briefcase.
Wally's book also is a gift of great value to Man-Age Press, the legal owner of Champion Studios. Some words of warning, however: Wally's memory failed him from time to time, and he got some of the model's names wrong. (Who can blame him? All of those hunks would blow anybody's mind.) The official site has the correct names.