Bondi Classic is an exciting and sensual eulogy, a tribute through photography to the Australian heroic ideal.

This thought-provoking collection of photographic portraits comprises a vast and varied array of some of Australia's top actors, models, sports stars and Olympians, (including a champion Ironman, Princess Diana's personal trainer, a Mister Australia body building champion, actors from international theatre and film, television soap stars, top players in the Australian Rugby League football code, an Olympic boxer, diver and wrestler, and an Australian Man Of The Year!)

Located within the ancient and moody coastal topography of Sydney, resplendent in its’ own drama, and liberally utilizing religious and classic art references, Bondi Classic takes us on an epic of unabashed male physicality. Maintaining a reverential distance from its’ subjects, the work revels in the paradoxes of masculinity; the subjects are strong yet sensual, courageous while provocative, violent whilst divinely innocent.

Bondi Classic is over 300 photographs on 204 pages of art stock paper, hard bound (250x340x25mm).

“While sorting through my photographs to make this book, religious art images from my childhood kept coming to mind.

One was from an illustrated children's Bible, of the conversion of the Roman soldier Saul on the road to Damascus. Saul was painted in high remaissance glory, greatly distressed, pinned to the ground by a blinding light from Heaven, symbolizing cathartic revelation.

Another was a holy picture awarded to me by a nun in convent school for commendable behavior. (A holy picture is kind of catholic business card depicting a moment in their mythology.) Again painted with romanticized classicism, it was of Saint Sebastian, his physique barely clad in a loincloth, pinned to a stake, being bloodily martyred with arrows shot by cherubic angels. I was confused by what was depicted since I was already indoctrinated with the ‘sinfulness’ of eroticism especially in regard to the male body. And this image had both! Somehow I must have reconciled the paradox by looking at the picture a lot!

And when I was eight I was fascinated by Caravaggio's 'Flagellation Of Christ' on the wall of the local presbytery, even memorizing the artist's name.  

Years later I learned I had been exposed to the work of the Humanists of the Renaissance, and their successors. On canvas and in sculpture, these artists revived the anatomical proportions of classical antiquity. They showed man for the first time as the center of a romanticized holy universe, struggling bravely through revelations towards enlightenment. They painted erotic tableaus, the Sistine soap operas of their day. And most importantly for me, they idealized the hero as a Herculean man of almost feminine sensuality, and vulnerability.

Thankfully, centuries later, their work made it to Australia, albeit as a rather incongruous element of an otherwise austere Irish catholic tradition, and became a seminal influence in the life of an impressionable boy.

Of course I had to be cured of some of some of the other effects of religion before I began photographing the male nude. I was eventually impressed by less sanctified forms of classicism in the photography of Leni Reivenstahl, Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts.  But I often unconsciously styled physique shoots from within reverential parameters.  I imagined that each image is a still from some holy epic, or a detail from an historic tableau. And on many occasions the ancient and moody coastal topography of Sydney provided the drama. Creating a story helped me (it still does) engage the subject and depict their manliness as something more emotive than self-conscious physicality; something heroic according to my acquired aesthetic.

This aesthetic is related to the Australian hero ethos, also shaped strongly by Irish Catholicism. The Aussie man's a battler, he's confident but self-deprecating, a larrikin but introverted, naïve and therefore sensual and vulnerable.

The subjects in my book are mainly inexperienced as models. They are sportsmen or actors or just extraordinary men in one way or another pushing themselves through their own fear thresholds in being photographed, as part of their quest for various personal goals.  In the process, their commitment and unaffectedness played a large part in creating photographic stories and in one way or another they become their heroic selves “. Paul Freeman