Romantic Boys

  • Dates
    2016 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Location Melbourne, Australia

Hello, I’m Jo Duck. I’m a commercial photographer based in Melbourne with a love for flamboyance, image making and the bizarre.

My new series of staged portraits take cliches of masculinity and ties them with tropes of romance to create camp and celebratory images of men.

Since birth, we’ve been fed images of smoking cowboys, muscle men, hairy chests and fast cars as symbols of virile masculinity.

Furthermore we’ve been told wedding proposals should be on one knee at sunset, to ‘say it with flowers’, and women’s magazines constantly nudge at us about keeping things exciting in the bedroom.

This series is an observation on what we’ve been sold as the perfect combination of hard and soft, the ‘ultimate man’. But when combined these images come off as a camp, sometimes sleazy and often tongue in cheek exploration of what it’s like to be the ultimate man in love.

It’s John Wayne taking a bubble bath by candlelight.

© Jo Duck - Noel with Teddy 2019
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Noel with Teddy 2019

© Jo Duck - Pregnant at the Madonna Inn 2017
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Pregnant at the Madonna Inn 2017

© Jo Duck - Cowboys at sunset 2019
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Cowboys at sunset 2019

© Jo Duck - Hunk 2017
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Hunk 2017

© Jo Duck - Boki, St Albans 2016
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Boki, St Albans 2016

© Jo Duck - Trump Tower 2019
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Trump Tower 2019

© Jo Duck - The break up 2019
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The break up 2019

© Jo Duck - Supermarket Roses 2019
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Supermarket Roses 2019

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