If you enjoy vintage male models, this book  is  a  MUST  HAVE! 

All the critics agree!

"Bob's World: The Life and Boys of A.M.G.'s Bob Mizer , TASCHEN's yummy new book of highly camp, often sexy, and occasionally iconic male nudes, is a wonderful treasure...If you love James Bidgood (Taschen's 25th Anniversary Special Edition) and Pierre et Gilles (Album Pierre et Gilles (Pierre & Gilles Album) ), you will adore this wickedly whimsical peep at ripe hungry muscle boys, shot by the pioneer of the genre. It's totally at the top of my Christmas gift A-list."

The W.O.W Report, Los Angeles

 

The photos here DO NOT even do the book justice. In our effort to keep this site rated  PG, we could not display the gorgeous full color nudes, many crystal clear and saturated with color!

Bob Mizer spent 48 years making photos and films for his Athletic Model Guild, and 41 years publishing Physique Pictorial, America's first, and most explicitly gay physique magazine. His diaries, kept from the age of eight, make it clear that he was openly homosexual from his late teens, but until the age of 42 he lived and worked in his mother's L.A. rooming house, where his strict ethical code prevented him from fully expressing his fantasies. For 24 years he worked in black and white and never showed a completely naked man, but following his mother's death in 1964 Mizer built a kingdom dedicated to the pleasures of male flesh, and photographed fully nude men in explicit poses and psychedelically saturated colors.

In the 1970s and '80s Bob Mizer's compound, centered around the old rooming house, became home to dozens of his young models, who lived outdoors on couches and porch gliders among the chickens, geese, goats and monkeys, Roman statuary, cast off Christmas trees and other sundry props that featured in his increasingly quirky films and photography.

Sometimes called the Hugh Hefner of gay publishing for his pioneering magazine (republished in entirety by TASCHEN in 1997), Mizer influenced figures in art and society from David Hockney–who first came to America partly to meet Bob Mizer–to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who modeled for Mizer in 1975.

Bob's World: The Life and Boys of AMG's Bob Mizer is the first book to celebrate the full-color, deliriously uninhibited carnival of late-period Mizer. Over 250 photos are accompanied by an oral history by contributing artists David Hockney, Jack Pierson and John Sonsini, photographers David Hurles and Hal Roth, models Ben Sorensen and Andrew Sears, and Wayne Stanley, inheritor of the Mizer estate.

The book also  includes a one-hour DVD of Mizer films spanning 1958–1980, specially edited for this edition.



This is an amazing collection of work. And the stories that go along with it are quite entertaining. It's  a shame that in 1994, 2 years after Bob Mizer passed  away, the AMG compound got diveded up and sold off.  It was an amazing piece of property - and history!


In 2004, former Falcon  Studio photographer Dennis Bell purchased the AMG estate and  has been organizing and launching  AMG online!  You can imagine, there were thousands of neglected faded images packed in boxes, negatives everywhere, scrapes of papers  and notes galore!  Archivists and digital communications experts were brought in and have painstakingly rebuilt the studio in Northern California.

The 60 year old studio has been brought into the 21st century. And eventually the ENTIRE  AMG ARCHIVES, including over 3000  films, 7500 hours of video and Bob's original Physique Pictorial, will all be avilable online! This is one piece of history that will not be lost!











Best Gay News