Man: An American Assay

Eva Lipman, Ken Graves, and Margaret Werry

These images are the fruit of Ken Graves and Eva Lipman’s decade-long inquiry into the rituals that mark the production of masculinity in late-capitalist America. They are a testament to the energies generated, and always incompletely incorporated, by liberal governmentality. In these photographs, such energies are brought starkly into view by the surplus—that something excessive—produced in the investment of subjects in, and by, liberalism’s signature institutions and corporeal practices. Investigating sites of civic involvement and voluntary association, of pedagogical and military discipline, and the private obsessions of leisure and sport, rendered public in spectacle and its commodification, this work understands bodies—organized in affectively heightened, highly codified action—as points of ingress into social imaginaries.

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