1

In a 1965 portrait of Andreas Baader (Figure 1), German photographer Herbert Tobias

stunningly captures the soon-to-be leader of the Red Army Faction. In admiration of young

Baader, Tobias isolates the bare-chested figure against an ambiguous white background. Only a

few tree branches from the top right corner place Baader in a real-world context. Baader, whose

shirt lies to his side, sits with his left leg over his right, and his arms crossed in front of his

pelvis; he stares directly at Tobias with a neutral smirk. Like Tobias’s many other portrait sitters,

Baader’s eyes are clearly defined, visible, and piercing; unlike many of the others, Baader’s

closed body language acutely denies Tobias access, reflecting an unequal relationship between

the two. Herbert Tobias was affectionately drawn to Baader; his unrequited love forms the

affective background for the image’s production.1 In this portrait, Baader isn’t sexualized, but

almost preserved in admiration. Throughout his career, it is evident that the subject of Tobias’s

photography goes beyond the superficial visual elements; in this paper, I argue how Tobias’s

work presents a visual record of his existential feelings and desires and leaves behind

photographic evidence of a mid-century queer relationality.2

Homosexuality’s legal history in Germany since unification in 1871 was, for the most

part, dependent on Paragraph 175, a provision that illegalized male homosexual relations and

compared it to bestiality.3 In the twentieth century, the law was complicated by Hitler’s Third

Reich and the country’s division following the Second World War. During the Weimar period

1 Anna-Carola Krausse, “Das Bild Bin Ich,” in Der Fotograf Herbert Tobias, ed. Ulrich Domröse (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 2008), 21. 2 Ulrich Domröse, forward to Der Fotograf Herbert Tobias (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 2008), 7. 3 Robert Moeller, “The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Postwar East and West Germany: An Introduction,” Feminist Studies 36 (2010): 521.

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there was growing pressure to reform the law to add decriminalizing measures.4 However, in the

Nazi state, there was a growing pervasion promoting a healthy (hetero-) sexual lifestyle, and

reform came to ¶175 that harshly expanded the consequences for the ‘crime’ of homosexual

conduct.5 When the Allies abolished all National Socialist laws that had been in place following

Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, they left ¶175 (and the Nazi revisions) up to the

new German states, both East and West, to decide on their own.6 For the purposes of this paper, I

will primarily be discussing the queer worlds of Tobias’s photography against the background of

¶175 in the western Federal Republic (FRG), where Tobias lived and worked following World

War II.

Beginning his photographic career in Paris, the fashion capital of the world, under the

supervision of Willy Maywald, Tobias perfected his artistic style. He often used a strong

chiaroscuro effect to create a visual contrast that situated haute-couture against the backdrop of

the city, one example being Abenkleid von Horn auf dem Kurfürstendamm (1958, Figure 2). His

personal, mostly noncommissioned, photography utilized similar characteristics. Of this

selection, I will primarily be discussing those of Tobias’s photographs which could be

considered an archive of queer relationality. The images that I have chosen feature men with

whom he had brief encounters, perhaps meeting them in bars, train stations or tearooms

throughout Paris and Western Germany.

4 Moeller, “Regulation of Male Homosexuality,” 522. 5 Ibid., 523. 6 Robert Moeller, “Private Acts, Public Anxieties, and the Fight to Decriminalize Male Homosexuality in West Germany,” Feminist Studies 36 (2010): 531.

3

After visiting Tobias’s solo exhibition in 2008 at the Berlinische Galerie, Jennifer Evans

wrote with regards to a photograph of one of the photographer’s most famous young models

(Manfred, 1957, Figure 3),

It is part of an archive of experience, a memento of a chance encounter between the photographer and the sitting subject. Traded among friends before surfacing in him and later in the gallery space, it is a commodity for various kinds of consumption. Awash with subcultural codes and referents, it encapsulates an ongoing aesthetic conversation about how to render queer desire photographically, and it is a record of a time of illegality and persecution. It is an icon of oppositionality, a claim to a queer structure of feeling and way of life. And now it has moved from the underground world of cruising and the sex trade into one of the most venerable realms of academic disputation, rendering the profane respectable in much the same way as a gallery exhibition made a trophy photo high art.7

With this statement, Evans identifies several important facets of Tobias’s erotic imagery; in the

museum space, Tobias’s colloquial images present symbols for queer relationality. Because of

homosexuality’s prevalent criminality, Tobias’s photographs were not typically shown publicly.

It wasn’t until the 1970s, following the abolition of ¶175 in 1969, that Tobias began to publish

his photographs and essays in the gay men’s magazine him applaus; his first solo exhibition

occurred in 1981 at Galerie Nagel only a few months before his death in 1982.8 Following

contact from this exhibition, Tobias established a firm relationship with the Berlinische Galerie,

which led to the museum’s inheritance of Tobias’s entire collection.9 The 2008 retrospective,

Blick and Begeheren, is the first in which Tobias’s work is comprehensively discussed and

illuminated.10 From the secret viewings of underground exchange to the limited publications in

him and the few exhibitions, Tobias’s photographs have not been widely available for viewing

7 Jennifer Evans, “Seeing Subjectivity:Erotic Photography and the Optics of Desire,” The American Historical Review 118 (April 2013): 432. 8 Domröse, “Vorwort,” 7. 9 Ibid., 7-8. 10 Ibid., 7.

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until the twenty-first Century. With the Berlinische Galerie’s retrospective came a complete

image catalog, and even further, a digital gallery hosted publicly.11 With this, Tobias’s work

becomes accessible, and the queer worlds captured by his camera are offered to us as visual

representations of queer relationality.

In a 1968 photograph titled Hermann (Figure 4), a man sits, naked from the waist down;

his blurred face is nearly hidden by shadow and his groin is in perfect focus. This photograph of

Hermann literally focuses on the figure’s genitalia, a nod to the brief physical relationship the

two may have had. Importantly in this image, Hermann looks back directly at Tobias; he

relinquishes control to the photographer. Three gazes are captured in this photograph: Tobias

through the camera at Hermann, Hermann back at the camera/Tobias, and the incidental

exchange between Hermann and the viewer.

In this image, Hermann is objectified by Tobias’s sexualizing gaze; in his partially-nude

state, Hermann willingly opens himself up to the photographer’s desires. Steve Druckman writes,

in an essay that applies Laura Mulvey’s influential gaze theories to viewing between gay men,

that, “Traditionally, men had to maintain a phallic hardness to combat the softness associated

with being the gaze’s object (read: ‘woman’).”12 In his essay Druckman is describing a

heteronormative mode of looking with reference to the public persona of male pop stars. It was a

hyper-masculine appearance, the phallic hardness, that allowed men to still hold their power

when being viewed and adored by female spectators. The female gaze upon a male subject

11 Reference to, Der Fotograf Herbert Tobias edited by Ulrich Domröse published by the Berlinische Galerie and the corresponding website, http://www.herberttobias.com/ also published by the Berlinische Galerie. 12 Steve Druckman, “The Gay Gaze, or Why I Want My MTV,” in A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, ed. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (London: Routledge, 1995), 91.

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parallels with the gay male gaze in that both view the object with a scopophilic pleasure.13 In the

case of Hermann, and Tobias’s many other photographs, the erotic subject is almost never fully

aroused; when photographed, the men in Tobias’s images often appear either flaccid or semi-

erect. Hermann appears flaccid, the need to portray a phallic mode of power is lost; Hermann

subjects himself to the will of Tobias and the camera, and to viewers of Tobias’s prints.

The relational discrepancy between the male sitters and female subjects of his fashion

photography can be witnessed in their visual positions. Anna-Carola Krausse writes in her

chapter on Tobias’s work, “Das Bild Bin Ich”, from the Blicke und Begehren exhibition

catalogue, that the male sitters of Tobias’s portraits are often found in clichéd poses – an arm

clasped behind the head, cigarette in mouth, thumbs hooked in his belt – their stanaces are not

conventionally professional; they are posing for their friend behind the camera. Their

deliberately casual stances are part of the interaction, leaving room for individuality, the

expression of personality, and provoke the intimate relationships held between the sitter and the

photographer.14 They allowed for the model to distinguish themselves from ‘image object’ and

retain their identity. The comfort suggested in these photographs speaks to the relationship that

existed outside of the image’s frame. As Tobias’s male subjects were often short-lived sexual

partners, their encounters expound on the relationality existent within queer culture and

relationships. The boundaries between Tobias and his subjects could not be reflected by the

heteronormative power dynamics of “phallic hardness;” these relationships, at least as depicted,

represent a softer, mute intimate moment.

In a particularly early image from Tobias’s time in Heidelberg, Das Lied von der

13 Ibid., 84-85. 14 Krausse, “Das Bild Bin Ich,” 19.

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sexuellen Hörigkeit – am Neckar (1954, Figure 5), Tobias and a fellow young man (presumably

his lover Dick, an American Ex-Pat) stand in the nude. Both men are standing facing the camera;

Tobias sharply leans to his left supported only by the strength of the other man and the small

strap that binds their hands. In a deliberate staging, Tobias captured this image in such a way that

the bodies of the men reflect the geometry of the shadow on the wall. Tobias stands parallel to

the angled bars of what appears to be an electricity tower, while his friend stands perpendicular

to the ground, a reflection of the tower’s main structure, and if this is his partner Dick, a literal

representation of the support he gives Tobias.

Despite the inclusion of two nude men, this photo is less overtly erotic than his other

nude portraits. The title of the photograph alludes to a sexual relationship between the men, but

by referring to the image as a “song”, it is my impression that this photograph represents a more

florid connection than just their “sexual bondage.” The support that Dick provides Tobias, and

the poetic nature of the musical reference implies that this photograph’s subject is more

metaphorically motivated than sexually. The focus of the image is the relationship between the

two men, but not their sexual gratification toward one another; they stand, paralleled to a literal

structure of society. In the 1950s, a number of gay bars and night clubs existed, particularly in

the larger cities such as Hamburg, however, the rate of convictions violating ¶175 during the

1950s rose by forty-four percent.15 Queer sociability was forced underground, hidden away; this

image becomes part of a practice of reclamation.

Tobias’s more erotic work creates a visual channel of queer sociability. As Evans argues,

it was one that “was quite laboratory in ways, providing same-sex-desiring men a palate of visual

pleasures with which to reaffirm their sense of self, while animating (and thereby legitimizing)

15 Moeller, “Private Acts,” 530.

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their own fantasies, longings, and desires in the process.”16 Many of Tobias’s images visually

document “the cruising gaze,” images of men looking at other men, men looking at Tobias, and

all seductively at play.

Cruising is an avenue for queer culture to establish itself. In their influential discussion of

queer sociability, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue for the world-making potential of

such queer subcultural institutions as cruising;

Queer culture has found it necessary to develop this knowledge in mobile sites of drag, youth culture, music, dance, parades, flaunting, and cruising- sites whose mobility makes them possible but also renders them hard to recognize as world making because they are so fragile and ephemeral. They are paradigmatically trivialized as “lifestyle.” But to understand them only as self-expression or as a demand for recognition would be to misrecognize the fundamentally unequal material conditions whereby the institutions of social reproduction are coupled to the forms of hetero culture.17

The fragility and mobility of cruising provided an avenue for male queer sociability. Cruising

allows gay men to discretely connect, to establish a sense of identity, and participate in a

movement that is crucial in order to survive and thrive in a legally hetero-centric world. Queer

world-making, as discussed by Berlant and Warner, is the construction of a queer culture often

including a network of connections outside the visible community or traditional structures of

society.18

In his dual portrait with Dick, Tobias establishes a queer world outside of the

heteronormative ideals of family structure and kinship. Together, he and his love form a support

structure that visually contradicts a typical domestic space; however, their queer world is a

visible representation of a “counterpublic- an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its

16 Evans, “Seeing Subjectivity,” 439. 17 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 561. Emphasis mine. 18 Berlant, “Sex In Public,” 558.

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subordinate relation.”19 The visual parallel with the power tower highlights the pair as a social

structure; their alignment with the shadow conveys a secondary nature to their composition. In

this image, Tobias and Dick are contextually paired not with the actual tower, but its shadow – a

deliberate choice by Tobias – which reflects the subordinate, secondary nature of the queer

couple’s relation to society. Like a shadow, their queer world is fragile, and dependent on outside

factors. Nevertheless, Tobias’s pictorial representations of queer relationality also expand into

more publically visible spaces, where his queer worlds often become directly juxtaposed with

traditional domestic modes of behavior.

Tobias’s erotic imagery conveys sexual desire in the open streets of Paris and Germany

through “the cruising gaze” and the distinctive relations between men and their environment.

However, many of Tobias’s images feature the aftermath of the cruising-street-pick-up; several

photographs are taken in closed private or hidden spaces. I would now like to discuss two of the

many images from Tobias’s body of work that elaborate on erotic desire; one of them is Prendez

un verre…tu sais…St. Germain des Prês (1953, Figure 6), an image that publicly captures a

lingering gaze in a Parisian bar. The other image, Lazy Afternoon (1975, Figure 7), follows

Tobias to a private space, where Tobias voyeuristically captures a man subjecting himself to the

camera, and plausibly waiting to be taken by Tobias himself.

In the 1953 photograph Prendez un verre…tu sais…St. Germain des Prês, a single young

man sits at a bar with a glass of beer to his lips; he holds a cigarette with his left hand and

intently stares at a man beyond Tobias’s camera. It is uncertain at whom the man is looking; it

could be Tobias (in this case, he would have taken this photo with the camera resting on the bar)

or a fellow patron in the background. It can be inferred based on Tobias’s interest in the moment,

19 Ibid.

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and the location in St. Germain des Prês, that Tobias captured an instant depicting the gay male

‘cruising gaze.’20 With the title, “get a drink…you know…”, Tobias playfully implies that more

is happening than just a drink (i.e. “so, you say” with a hint of facetiousness).

In an essay that analyzes cruising and sociability, Leo Bersani asks, “Does cruising make

us feel as, perhaps even more, worthy than a comfortably monogamous straight couple?”21

Cruising, in its most practical sense is an active exercise in impersonal intimacy. Bersani further

describes cruising as, “…the game of coquetry described by Simmel moved into a sexual relation

– but one to which Simmel’s description of a nonsexual coquetry would still apply.”22 Georg

Simmel’s game of “coquetry “plays out the forms of eroticism”; it moves between “hinted

consent and hinted denial,” “swings between yes and no,” stopping at neither pole, divesting

sexuality of consequential decisions.”23 This rhythmic form of sociability bases itself in

association and separation.24 The impersonal intimacy associated with cruising provides bodies

the chance to connect at an innate level; the often anonymous relationships that form between the

gazing men lead to a psychological satisfaction and sense of of being within a set of social

principles. These relationships are an aspect of queer sociability, as the “solitariness of the

individual is resolved into togetherness.”25

20 David Higgs, ed., Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600 (London: Routledge, 2002), 29. “After World War II, French intellectual life, dominated by existentialism, set up headquarters in the cafes of St. Germain des Prês on the Left Bank. The district’s bars and clubs were soon the focus of the city’s vibrant nightlife. They drew so many gay men and lesbians that guidebooks labeled St. Germain des Prês ‘a world center for all such [homosexual] activities’ and ‘the kingdom of “queens”’ (Rudorff 1969: 300; Bastiani 1968: 115).” 21 Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 60. 22 Bersani, Is The Rectum a Grave?, 60. 23 Ibid., 47. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 45.

10

As with Prendez un verre…tu sais…St. Germain des Prês, Tobias omits the names of the

figures in many of his cruising images. By doing so, Tobias’s images create an abstraction of

queer culture, and sociability. Tobias’s subject becomes the social acts within these relationships

and the solidarity between figures, rather than the specific interactions pictured. In the

photograph, the unidentified man gazes outward, Tobias looks at him, and a third man on the far

right of the picture plane looks back at Tobias. This triangular gaze speaks to the uncertain

rhythm that constructs sociability; the image forces us to ask, who is flirting with whom? What is

the result? What is their history? And, where do they go from here? All which are questions

possibly being asked by the men themselves. This back and forth ‘playfulness’ “divest[s]

sexuality of consequential decisions” because in a way, the answers to the questions are

insignificant.26 Tobias’s queer world is structured around the act of cruising, the potential, and

the now-visible desires between men. As Krausse writes,

While the photographer usually seeks direct eye contact with his subject, here he exercises restraint. The sitters keep to themselves. Hovering between nostalgia and promise, they depend on their thoughts; their eyes wander into indefinite distance or inner worlds. The “dreamers” are set aside as those people whose devotion is directed not to the imagined but on the concrete here and now. 27

The “dreamers” in Tobias’s photographs, with imagination and desire, perpetrate Tobias’s queer

world in moments of wistful reverie.

In the case of Lazy Afternoon, it seems that the subject of Tobias’s camera is the potential

of the pending encounter. From a hallway, Tobias looks into a bedroom where a man wearing

nothing but a leather jacket and a belt stands leaning on the top of a small bunk bead. The figure

and cluttered beds are framed by the doorway; our eyes are drawn to the partially nude man

26 Bersani, Is The Rectum a Grave?, 60. 27 Krausse, “Das Bild Bin Ich,” 14.

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whose back faces us and Tobias. The man’s legs are spread apart forming strong diagonals that

lead our eyes to his visible, but shaded, genitals. Interestingly, the man looks into a concave

mirror magnifying his face; he is looking straight at Tobias as if calling for him. The man’s eyes

are clearly looking at Tobias. The optical back and forth between the men prompts us to

determine the power relationship in this photograph; does the figure represent “feminized”

penetrability as a submissive sexual partner? Or does the figure’s sartorial masculinity and

calling gaze solicit penetration, almost as a challenge?

The introduction of the mirror in this photograph reconstructs the power of the gaze and

provides us with insight into the relationships formed in Tobias’s queer world. The gaze in the

mirror reflects the gaze given by Tobias, and in a way, displays the photograph within itself.

In Lazy Afternoon the mirror not only reflects the gaze, as subject of the photograph, and

creates a visual repetition of power, but also establishes an opportunity for Tobias to identify

with the Other. Carol Armstrong writes, “The mirror also presents an object surface off of which

the viewer’s gaze must bounce and be returned to him rather than a transparent plane that

purports to be penetrable.”28 In a moment in which we imagine Tobias as the viewer, and the

mirror figuratively reflects his own gaze, we encounter Tobias’s ‘splitting of the self’ as he is

now the one who is sexually submitting. Yet, the mirror itself also has an element of elusive

queerness; Armstrong continues,

The mirror is in our space, perhaps, but it is not of it. The glassiness of its surface – its translucence, slickness, and brilliance – and its reversal of left and right, along with the frustratingly dyslexic effect it often has on the viewer: these are the visible effects of the mirror that, like the bodilessness of the photograph, define its elusiveness, its failure really to be in the world.29

28 Carol Armstrong, “Reflections on the Mirror: Painting, Photography, and the Self-Portraits of Edgar Degas,” Representations 22 (1988): 111. 29 Armstrong, “Reflections on the Mirror,” 111.

12

The mirror creates a distorted view of reality. In the case of Tobias’s photograph, the mirror

distorts our immediate understanding of the gaze and the relationship between the two men. Lazy

Afternoon creates a visually unstable connection between Tobias, his desires, and the potential of

his romantic encounter.

Photographed in a private setting, the encounter in Lazy Afternoon pictures the hidden

private nature of queer culture. Despite the gay liberation movement, queer visibility during the

1970s was still not widely accepted.30 Judith (Jack) Halberstam writes, “normative

temporalities…privilege longevity over temporariness, permanence over contingency, and so on.

These normative conceptions of time and relation make permanent (even if estranged)

connections take precedence over random (even if intense) associations.”31 Temporary,

contingent, and random define the social relations established in Tobias’s body of work.

Evidenced by Tobias’s photography, mid-century queer sociability often relied on these types of

connections. Kraus concludes her essay in Blicke und Begehren,

His photographs are autobiographical to the highest degree but not in the sense of a documentary, but a fixation on lived life. Tobias’s photos are not mirror images of action, but reflexes of emotional inner worlds. Poetic, sensual, melancholic, or pathetic theater, he transforms the reality expressed. Tobias’ pictorial representations are always products of his aspirations and self-image, his obsessions and passions, his own pathos, his melancholy and loneliness.32

Tobias’s photographs represent his perceptions of mid-century queer sociability. His dreams,

desires, and feelings were all projected onto his work, creating a personal world of love, sex, and

perversion mostly in a time when homosexuality was a criminal act. From Tobias’s images, we

gain an intimate access into post-war queer relationality.

30 Moeller, “Private Acts,” 548. 31 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 72. 32 Krausse, “Das Bild Bin Ich,” 22.

Herbert Tobias- Andreas Baader 1965Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, DE

Kat. Nr. 121

Figure 1:

Herbert Tobias- Abenkleid von Horn auf dem Kurfürstendamm 1958Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, DE

Kat. Nr. 007

Figure 2:

Herbert Tobias- Manfred 1957Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, DE

Kat. Nr. 149

Figure 3:

Herbert Tobias- Hermann 1958Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, DE

Kat. Nr. 86

Figure 4:

Herbert Tobias- Das Lied von der sexuellen Hörigkeit – am Neckar 1954Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, DE

Kat. Nr. 84

Figure 5:

Herbert Tobias- Prendez un verre…tu sais…St. germain des Prês 1953Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, DE

Kat. Nr. 89

Figure 6:

Herbert Tobias- Lazy Afternoon 1975Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, DE

Kat. Nr. 117

Figure 7:

13

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2008. Domröse, Ulrich, ed. Der Fotograf Herbert Tobias 1924-1982: Blicke und Begehren. Berlin:

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Gay Men and Popular Culture, edited by Paul Burston and Colin Richardson, 81-98. London: Routledge, 1995.

Evans, Jennifer. “Seeing Subjectivity: Erotic Photography and the Optics of Desire.” The

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Domröse, 11-23. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 2008. Moeller, Robert. “Private Acts, Public Anxieties, and the Fight to Decriminalize Male

Homosexuality in West Germany.” Feminist Studies 36 (2010): 528-552. � “The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Postwar East and West Germany: An

Introduction.” Feminist Studies 36 (2010): 521-527. Owens, Craig. “Photography “en abyme”.” October 5 (1978): 73-88.