Strong Man Vintage Photos of a Masculine Icon, A Postcard Book

We don't expect our icons to have interior lives. And yet here are images that tell stories, human stories, without compromising the iconic nature of their subjects. The men in Sailor somehow manage to be simultaneously real and unreal, ordinary guys elevated into myth by extraordinary circumstances. The men of Strongman strike self-conscious poses, but the photographs are anything but artificial, even the anonymous hunks pumping iron in the backyard, behaves as if under a spotlight. The camera captures the honesty and intensity of a body that displays itself.