Ken Haak was a fashion photographer who served in WWII. My favorite collection of his work is in a book called Sleeping Beauty’s. In this book men are captured sleeping nude or close to nude, laid out on top of crisp white blankets and sheets, in the arms of each other or alone. This book was published in 1989, a time when love between two men was not only being shunned by the vast majority in the USA but also during the height of the AIDS crisis. In one of the portraits, you see a man lying on a bed sleeping and below him is a rotary phone and a New York Times newspaper. The following year, after this book was published, in April 1990, in that same newspaper, would be an obituary of my beloved uncle, John Fisher, announcing his death due to AIDS related complications. I can’t help but look at these photographs, Kens erotic gaze of these men, allowing them the silence, the peace, the space to rest during a time of such distress and upheaval. The constant ringing of the phones, the continuous announcements of deaths. It captures the freedom to be seen as anyone else would be seen behind closed doors, in the safety it takes to sleep. The rotary phone pictured in one of the photographs was also the same kind of phone that rang, that we answered, to receive the news that John had died.
In 2025 looking at these photos, without context to history, you might think of models being photographed but with the context to what was happening at the time these robust bodies full of life, photographed in their sexuality, men embracing men, celebrating the life of these men, it becomes an important testament to beauty, to acceptance, to the tenderness of love. Thank you, Ron Stark, for being able to capture this on film.
-Jen Fisher