Nicola and Manuel’s debut book looks to moments of tenderness in an exploration of the male gaze. “We found it interesting to see male bodies portrayed with an aura of mystery without being voyeuristic,” they say
Tall, slim and tender, the subjects in photography duo Nicola and Manuel’s debut book, Cat Tree, are a world away from the traditional images of burly, rugged masculinity. “Movies, fashion, and photography, are all complicit in making some representations more desirable than others,” asserts the Italian photography duo over email. “Sometimes even the smallest, most unconscious gestures, like the way one is sitting, or the thickness of a strap, speak volumes about the power relations of gender in daily life.”
The circumstances under which Cat Tree was conceived can be boiled down to a chance encounter with Enrico, the expressive dark-haired “muse” that graces the cover of their monograph. “It was a rainy day in Berlin and we invited him to take some pictures at our place,” says Nicola. “We had never met anyone so charming before. There is something timeless and contemporary at the same time about him; ageless, effortlessly insouciant and cheeky.” Clasping a furry scarf, or reclining against padding wrapped in delicate transparent plastic – in one image, against Enrico’s pale tattooed skin, he holds silver rings against his nipples – the duo captures candid, relaxed photographs of their muse freed from binaries, comfortable and intimate.
It’s an intimacy that comes part and parcel with the duo’s practice. Nicola and Manuel started working together after they began seeing one another in 2019. Despite emerging from different creative backgrounds, with Nicola an art director and Manuel a make-up artist, they were drawn to one another through the similarities in their upbringings and identities. While now based in Paris and Milan, they were both brought up in small towns in the north of Italy, where nature grows undisturbed against the still and monotonous urban landscape, and it was through photography that they found their medium to break up the tedium and isolation. “Somehow these ‘non-binary’ places without a defined identity informed our visions, drawing our interest towards the in-between state of things,” says Nicola. “A vibration rather than a permanent state.”
Following their images of Enrico, the duo enlisted a larger cast, finding ten other “muses” in total to fill the 68 pages of their monograph – including Eddie, a cat. “Although the book is quite paratactical in its sequence of portraits and moments, there is a subtle fil rouge that guides the eye, almost as if the characters and the cats are the same entity,” they say. Graceful, elegant, while ostensibly self-dependent with their slick, I-know-what-I-want attitude, the feline allure can be traced back to ancient Egypt where they were highly revered and associated with the goddess Bastet. “We feel the image production about male bodies has always been moving in the same few directions: the celebration of male nudity and the obsession with youth,” they say. “We found it interesting to see male bodies portrayed with an aura of mystery, without being voyeuristic.”
While fashion photography forges a new path that presents gender identity as malleable and performative for the camera, with it comes an expansion towards new nuances and acceptance in masculinity; Nicola and Manuel’s photography speaks to a community that lives those nuances freely. “Simone de Beauvoir once said ‘On ne naît pas femme, on le devient.’ It means that a ‘woman’ is something you become, it’s something you construct,” the duo say. “Biological differences are real, but culturally speaking, the way of being ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in the world is a performance of acts and mannerisms. You can create your own version of it, which may be an integration of both.”
Cat Tree by Nicola and Manuel is out now.
