Sharkey

Jim Jager

1980 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Jager‘s studio, founded in 1976 in Chicago, specialized in soft-core pornography featuring casually posed black male models. His photographs, stripped of the fantastic scenarios frequently contrived in erotica, were included in self-published magazines unabashedly titled Black Sugar, Black Roots, Black Fever, Black Knights, Black Gold, Black Stars, and Black Thunder. In their nonchalant sexuality and unairbrushed immediacy, brazen images such as those issued by Jager‘s studio became popular in underground circles in the 1970s and 1980s, and set the stage for Robert Mapplethorpe and others to push boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality.

Artist

Jim Jager

Date

1980

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Bequest of Winthrop Edey, 1999