Hoffman: Mid-Century Manly

It is not just a question of physical beauty;
it is something that the man can express to the eye of the camera.

Preface

THIS ARTICLE takes a double historical perspective. The original interview was made in 1986 looking back to work made in the fifties and sixties. The interviewee was a physique photographer called Frank Morton who published under the professional name of Hoffman of Edinburgh. I had been introduced to him while I was researching ‘Behold the Man’ – an extensive historical survey exhibition on the male nude in photography, which would later tour Britain, northern Europe, and Canada. We became friends and I visited him regularly in his home. He was by then around seventy and rarely went out. But he enjoyed talking about the past, a world very different from the one we were then living in, even more so from the one today…

Introduction – 1986

The physique and body-building magazines which proliferated in the fifties and sixties contained photographs by names such as The Athletic Model Guild [Bob Mizer] in the USA and Jean Ferrero in France. A little further down the list of photographic honours comes another name – that of the photographer who called himself Hoffman. Perhaps surprisingly, he lived and worked not in California or on the Côte d’Azur, but in Scotland.

Once voted one of the top three physique photographers in Europe, his work appeared in magazines such as Physique Illustrated, Modern Adonis, Tomorrow’s Man, and Body Beautiful. Hoffman’s photographs were more than just records of a given bodybuilder’s physique, they were imaginative, dramatic visions – sometimes humorous, but always with a strong sense of design. Powerful pictures of powerful men.

Today [1986] he lives the life of a recluse, seeing few people and, until now, refusing to be interviewed. We sit in the room which, years before, he used as his studio. Telltale signs remain: a tall posing mirror and a short classical column on which many a bodybuilder has rested his buttocks, and on which I now rest my coffee cup…

Alasdair Foster

Interview

When did you begin taking physique photographs?

My father was a bodybuilder. But he had long ago left my mother and me to return abroad when, by pure chance, I happened to meet the secretary of one of the local weightlifting clubs. He told me they were having a small local show and needed a photographer. I had just started taking photographs, but I said that I’d have a go.

Later, I was lucky enough to get to a ‘Mr…’ show. [Throughout Britain there were local bodybuilding contests for the title Mr. Manchester, Mr. Glasgow, and so on.] After the show we went out to take photographs of the contestants on the seashore, because at that time I had no experience of working indoors and needed daylight. That picture made the front cover of Health and Strength, which was nice. And it helped to pay for the film.

How did you progress from simply recording shows to your more pictorial photographs?

Some of the competitors wanted individual pictures of themselves. These could not be achieved satisfactorily under show lighting – there just wasn’t the time. So, I acquired some lamps and a backcloth and suggested we try some studio photographs. I got hold of a tall mirror so the bodybuilder could see himself while he arranged his pose. When he was happy with it – and I was happy with it – we took pictures.

That was a rather routine beginning. But it was much improved when a Canadian photographer and magazine editor who was visiting London travelled north to see me. He told me he had seen one or two of my pictures in the British physique magazines and that in both Canada and America there was an interest in Scottish bodybuilders. He then gave me the most useful piece of advice that I have ever had: never spare on film. That is the cheapest item. Take pictures and take more pictures. Vary everything: the lighting, the settings, the pose… and that way you will learn. He was right.

And as you learnt, your work began to sell?

Well, the position was this: in Britain I was really very little known apart from being a [bodybuilding] show photographer. But abroad people were frequently interested and wrote asking if they could have copies of my pictures. Or, if there was a particular bodybuilder that appealed to them, could they have, say, a set of six. This helped me a lot because I wasn’t usually paid by foreign magazines for the pictures they published. Instead, I got advertising space, which in turn produced orders for photosets.

What do you think were the key elements of the Hoffman style?

Personally, I always hoped the style varied depending upon the setting, the person I was working with, and the sheer ability that some people have to project. Some men simply had a way of connecting with the camera which greatly improved on what they were able to produce when posing on a competition platform [which was dictated by the rules of organisations such as the National Amateur Bodybuilders’ Association]. Not just in quality and style, but in the line, which I think is so important. The line should flow, however big the musculature.

Somebody once said that I had the ability (and they were not being very kind when they said it) to produce two or three good pictures of almost anybody! That was not really my aim. I came to find that, with certain subjects, there is an interaction. There is rapport. It is not just a question of physical beauty; it is something that the man can express to the eye of the camera. And for those men that have a little amour-propre, it is easy.

You used an interesting array of props, especially in your studio photographs. Where did you get them?

A lot of them were given to me, some were made for me by the athletes themselves [some of whom were carpenters, metalworkers, or builders]. There was a young man – a medal-winning marksman and very keen on Ju-Jitsu and Karate – who kept a flower shop and collected swords (which is a very interesting combination). I had a very fine collection of swords and antique daggers, but the whole lot was stolen in a burglary in the late sixties.

Why did you use so many props?

You must give people something to do. To give them a structure – to give them a reason. If they have something to hold, whether it’s a sword, or a pillar, or a beach-ball, there is an immediate sense of involvement, and their imagination begins to engage. Otherwise, if they are simply stood there, they don’t feel comfortable – they can’t relax. And, in a strange way, being relaxed and actively involved can produce high muscular definition, simply because they have something to work with.

Some of your outside locations are very spectacular. Were they difficult to find?

Something which is quite small in reality can, if you tilt the camera at the right angle, suddenly become towering and tremendous. (The same goes for short athletes.) When I was on location, I would ask at the local weightlifting club if there were any interesting locations thereabout. Sometimes it was an old castle, or a wartime gun emplacement, or some particularly nice woodland glade… or a quarry. I especially like quarries because, to me, the sculpting of stone by the weather, by natural forces, and by the quarrymen themselves is, in a sense, like the chiselling out and shaping that every bodybuilder endeavours with the components of his own physique. So, what could be more appropriate as a setting?

Mind you, it could be a hard day’s work by the time we had hiked to a location, spent several hours taking pictures and then hiked back with all the equipment.

Did you find posing models outdoors a problem, Scotland not being the warmest of countries?

I think foreign readers may imagine that the whole of Scotland covered in is shades of purple heather and buried in clouds of mist. It is not quite like that; any more than Normandy is like the Camargue.

Still, it’s not warm all the time, and I seem to remember seeing one or two Hoffman pictures of models posing outside in winter.

Ah well, Bill Starling did want to have some pictures taken of himself in the snow! I warned him that the snow would not reflect very well on his physique, but he was determined. On another occasion he jumped into the waterfall at the end of Glencoe when it was absolutely freezing cold. He was so happy there – he just loved water. Still, I must admit that from, say, October until the following March or April, I mostly worked indoors.

But to a large extent, the time of year we photographed and in which location depended on the subject himself: some men loved the sandy seashore and the wind in their face; others liked climbing rocks or trees. I would always ask them what they would like to do when we reached my chosen location and then see if it worked. If it didn’t, I would suggest we try something slightly different, which might just look better. In the final event, I was always the director… I remember sending Tim Bonnar scrambling many metres up some cliffs. He climbed up there with his bare hands wearing just a towel and a smile.

Did you find, working in the late fifties and early sixties, that there were strict rules regarding degrees of nudity in physique photographs?

Well, the question simply did not arise. One was sent a copy of the magazine by the editor and one saw what they were doing in the way of articles or pictures. And then one could decide whether or not one wanted to submit something.

But of course, in those days, bodybuilding and physique magazines never had frontal nudity. You may ask at what point is nudity reached… At the time, it was just a question of common sense and personal taste, I think.

What were your articles about?

The bodybuilders’ clubs in Scotland were widely scattered and a brief magazine write-up about a club with a photograph of its members was something that was very much valued among that wider community. Occasionally, I transcended the purely local. On one occasion I interviewed the American bodybuilder and film star Steve Reeves when he happened to be in Scotland buying cattle for his ranch in Oregon.

What are you doing now?

I’ve given up photography completely and turned to painting. I find great satisfaction in it because, if there is anything in the painting that I don’t like, I can simply remove it – which is more than you can do with a castle, or a rock, or an athlete who will bend his arm at one particular angle and you can’t get him to move it! [The manipulation of photographic images has changed radically since the days he was describing.]

My favourite subjects are cats. They are so lithe; they are so supple, and their faces are so expressive.

Why did you choose Hoffman as your nom d’artiste?

I have always been fascinated by the writing of the novelist E T A Hoffmann and above all by the Offenbach opera ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’. In some strange way, like the eponymous hero I have been through many scenes, and I have played many parts. My life has been a ceaseless search to which there is no end.

Postscript – 2025

FRANK MORTON wrote about his early life in an unpublished essay, which he handed to me for safe keeping just before he entered hospital for the last time. His parents had married at the height of World War I – he was forty, she twenty years younger. As a child, Frank both admired and feared his father, a tall muscular man of “strange moods and tempers”. He grew up in the knowledge that, for his parents, he was “a perpetual bone of contention – a mother who adored me and a father who was determined that I should be tough, even if it killed me.” As an adult, aware he was attracted to men – a love that, at the time, dare not speak its name – Frank quickly learned the art of subterfuge.

This was perhaps not as hard as it might seem today. He was a charming urbane man – a confirmed bachelor and safe escort for a young society lady. And, while today the physique magazines of the post-World War II era appear self-evidently homophile in nature, at the time those associations could be discretely glossed over. Yes, they had a following among gay men, but they were also important to the bodybuilding community.

And the bodybuilders he photographed did not dwell too deeply on who would be looking at them or why. After all that hard work, these men wanted their physiques to be seen, to be appreciated. They had put enormous effort into reshaping their bodies at a time when there were few food supplements beyond powdered milk and eggs, and steroids remained a rarity. While the competitions offered the possibility of a trophy, they were more cattle market than art show. So, when the opportunity arose to be photographed aesthetically, sympathetically, they were more than happy to give it a go. While some of his subjects were undoubtedly gay, many were not. He was at ease with both and they with him. Frank charmed wives and girlfriends, who took pride in the way their menfolk turned out in his pictures. As their young families formed and grew, he attended weddings and christenings as an honoured guest.

photos by [left] Wilson Groat; [centre left and right] Courtland Press Bureau; [right] uncredited

For Frank, physique photography it was an opportunity to create images of desire that would ‘pass’ in public. To engage with men built like his father and to be the one in control as he turned blokes into figures of manly beauty. There was for both photographer and subject a liberating sense of stepping outside of the humdrum of daily life. When Frank told his stories of shooting on location, what struck me was how playful the process seems to have been. Far from inhibiting these men, the camera seemed to release their inner child. And, like a child, they could slip easily from splashing about in the sea or climbing a tree to adopting the persona of a pirate or gladiator with unfeigned commitment.

Meanwhile, the world around them was changing. Homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967. By 1968, Frank had started to wind down his physique photography. The demand for his kind of pictures waned as more overtly homoerotic imagery became available. While he welcomed this newfound freedom for others, for Frank – who had spent his life navigating the penumbra of the unspoken – such openness was unnerving. Especially as, in Scotland, his sexuality remained a crime. It was not until 1981 that, following pressure from the European Court of Human Rights, homosexuality was decriminalised north of the border. At the same time, the right-wing government of Margaret Thatcher was creating an atmosphere of officially sanctioned homophobia, one which would subsequently weaponise AIDS in its hostile rhetoric.

By the time I came to know him, Frank rarely left the house, no longer sure how to be in the world. He painted and wrote poetry. And in that poetry, he sought to express his affection for the men he had photographed, his delight in their bodies, and the ache he had felt while living in fear of the law and social opprobrium. The following extract is from a poem written in the mid-eighties, but looking back to his life as a young gay man:

George, too, these things will know and feel,
A world that’s hard and savage, real.
Please God he may not know that part
That’s damned my life, o’erborn my heart.

Frank withdrew into his photographic archive, the memories they evoked providing a kind of solace. A personal world in which the conflicts between manliness and paternal masculinity, between love and the law, between desire and despair had found their own rapprochement…

I offer this biographical context as a reminder that one should not too quickly judge the past from the perspective of the present, but open to the affective ebb and flow of the environment that shaped it.

The original interview was published in French in the weekly magazine Gai Pied Hebdo, Paris, in January 1987.

Subsequently published in English in the Australian magazine Outrage in February 1990.

~ Talking Pictures ~

Hoffman: Mid-Century Manly

Preface

Introduction – 1986

Interview

Postscript – 2025

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Preface

Introduction – 1986

Interview

Postscript – 2025

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