This photographer is ‘Subverting masculinity’ with male dancers – The Forward

A shot from “Stained,” photographer Nir Arieli’s newest venture. Photo by Nir Arieli

By Stav Ziv
September 20, 2025

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Before Nir Arieli began photographing dancers, his job was to take photos of troopers. These could look like disparate duties, nevertheless it was throughout Arieli’s obligatory army service that his future endeavors took root. He’s since constructed a physique of labor male dancers — exploring questions on masculinity via photos that quietly topple conventional notions and develop the vary of seen potentialities.

He’s been rolling out his most up-to-date venture, “Stained,” on Instagram since May. It’s a putting sequence of pictures shot in his previous Brooklyn residence over the course of three years, captured right here and there amid the calls for of a busy industrial profession working most frequently with dance companies.

These unconventional portraits of male dancers present them embraced, limbs intertwined, or else locked in a battle — perhaps each. They exude power and tenderness. They’re uncovered and hidden. Powerful and sleek. Masculine and masculine. It’s the newest chapter in an ongoing inventive investigation that traces again to the troopers Arieli photographed.

“That was the seed,” he informed me over Zoom from his new dwelling in New Jersey, the place he lately moved together with his husband. “Especially in a place like the military, where masculinity is such a huge emphasis, and a certain kind of masculinity,” he stated, “and especially with combat soldiers and units that I’ve seen, there’s a lot of pressure to be a man, to put on a facade of this unbreakable persona.”

His function as a photographer for the IDF’s weekly journal Bamahane, which ceased publication in 2016, took him to the desert, the mountains and the ocean, embedding with all types of items, typically for days at a time. He fought stubbornly for this project, which wasn’t the place the IDF had wished him in. Eight months into his obligatory three-year service, he received.

But many others he encountered on his military images assignments couldn’t say the identical about the place they’d ended up. “I remember specifically seeing these people who I felt like they were like zombies. They were put in a place that was not right for them,” he stated. “They didn’t use their talents, their skills. And they were just wilting.”

Arieli has all the time been involved in individuals, and this work gave him a chance to look carefully. “I saw these young men, like adult teenagers, that are put with a gun in their hands and being told, like, go be a fighter,” Arieli stated — whether or not they wished to or not. He noticed them each out and in of character. Underneath the floor, he glimpsed “gentle souls,” he stated. “I started photographing it then,” pointing his lens at these younger males when their macho masks slipped.

One photograph from the 2006 Lebanon War catches a younger soldier after an evening of bombing. “The whole earth was shaking, dirt going everywhere,” stated Arieli, who’d stayed with the unit within the north of Israel, ensconced in a sleeping bag not removed from the bombing machines. In daylight, the soldier — nonetheless curled up in his makeshift mattress, eyes closed, forehead furrowed — reaches one hand as much as tinker together with his ear safety, fixing what appear like headphones, performing for nobody.

“It was such a vulnerable moment,” Arieli stated. “Towards the end of my service, I started to look for those moments, the in-between moments, I call them, where they’re off guard.” He noticed sensitivity, kindness and intelligence. He noticed males who didn’t match one stereotype of manliness.

“I think what happened with the dancers later on is that I realized that they’re sort of the perfect example of that subverted masculinity,” he stated. “It was a natural progression to what I was doing before.”

Finding images, discovering dance

Growing up about midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in a small city referred to as Maccabim, now a part of Modi’in, Arieli had an inexplicable notion from a younger age that he wished to be an artist. Part of it, perhaps, was that he felt he was completely different from his male friends.

“Something about art felt comforting and right and correct for me, like a safe place for me to be in,” he stated. “But I didn’t know what I was good at, so I spent my teenage years trying a lot of different art forms and basically failing miserably in each one of them.” He tried graphic design, filmmaking, theater, portray and sculpture. Nothing was fairly proper till he picked up a digital camera.

He took an artwork observe in highschool with an emphasis on images, attempting his hand at all the things from panorama to nonetheless life and studying to print in the dead of night room. He saved coming again to individuals, and for his senior venture, he made a sequence of portraits of his instant household.

Then, later, after his formative expertise as a army photographer, one other member of the family opened his eyes to bop.

Arieli had leveraged his appreciable portfolio from his army service right into a scholarship on the School of Visual Arts in New York City. “In Israel, you show these pictures to people, and they’re like, yeah, okay, we’ve all been there,” he stated. “But abroad, it looked really impressive.”

When he arrived within the U.S., the one acquainted face was that of a second cousin he’d met only a handful of instances: Tal Adler Arieli had enrolled the earlier yr within the dance program at Juilliard. “He was very gracious,” stated Arieli of his cousin, who confirmed him across the metropolis and launched him to individuals. When Arieli wanted fashions for varsity initiatives, his cousin’s dancer buddies volunteered.

“So I was photographing Tal, I was photographing all of his friends, and in my spare time, I was coming to see their shows. Juilliard was an amazing place to be educated about dance,” stated Arieli, who’d beforehand had no publicity to the artform. “I was like a little child, seeing this for the first time and being blown away.”

He was “wowed” by the dance, however much more so by the dancers. He was fascinated by individuals who may transfer their our bodies in unbelievable, virtually alien methods. He wished to know who they had been, what their lives had been like and what sacrifices they needed to make to dedicate themselves to such a demanding artwork type. “A lot of the work that I’m making is not about dance,” he stated. “It’s about dancers.”

And this curiosity in a short time introduced him again to the questions he’d began asking when his lens was skilled on troopers.

Building a physique of labor 

Every scar, freckle, blemish, and stretch mark is seen in “Inframen.” The sequence makes use of infrared and ultraviolet processing to enlarge imperfections on the in any other case statuesque our bodies of male dancers. “That was my way to get under the dancers’ skin,” Arieli stated. He wished to focus on the stress between “the strength of the body and the fragility of the soul.”

As a pupil, Arieli was usually informed his work was “pretty,” and that he was destined to be a industrial photographer. Neither was a praise in artwork faculty. “So when I graduated and I was offered an exhibition, it shook my world,” he stated. “I was just doing the work that I felt passionate about, and someone liked it enough to put it on the wall in Chelsea. I remember that night, I couldn’t sleep. It was like, oh my god, maybe I am an artist.”

“Inframen” opened at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in 2014, adopted by “Flocks” in 2016. The latter, which captured dance corporations as intricate piles of inert our bodies, is the one sequence amongst greater than half a dozen private initiatives that included girls.

For probably the most half, Arieli has continued to ask the questions that took root when he was surrounded by troopers, trying previous reductive archetypes and trying to find numerous expressions of masculinity. “Flower He Is,” for instance, portrayed younger male dancers donning intricate floral headpieces, a metaphor for athletes in full bloom, on the peak of their talents, earlier than their youthful our bodies start to age and betray them. “Korban” — “victim” or “sacrificial offering” in Hebrew — paired male dancers of all ages in scenes of grief, struggling and misery.

Ori Flomin, a dancer and choreographer who posed for “Korban,” remembers they spent about an hour on the outside shoot. Arieli deftly and succinctly conveyed what he was searching for, Flomin stated, after which allowed the dancers to heed their very own inventive instincts. Once his fashions arrive on the proper tableau, Arieli sometimes directs them to refine particulars just like the angle of the top or the location of an arm. “He’s allowing people to be vulnerable,” Flomin stated. “To be more feminine or more masculine, or more who they are.”

“Korban” by no means confirmed in a gallery, and Arieli pivoted towards his industrial work, which was gathering momentum. Over the years, he’s taken on prestigious dance establishments together with Alvin Ailey and its faculty, American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Juilliard, and labored with company shoppers, conferences and nonprofits like Volunteers of America.

“But I didn’t want to let go of making things that I’m passionate and curious about,” he stated. “So I kept on making projects, but in very slow intervals.” For now, he’s been sharing his private work on social media, however he hopes to search out his manner again to a gallery.

“What I want to give to the world is a body of work about male dancers, and this is what I’m building,” he stated. “Every project is like a chapter.”

The most up-to-date entry in that oeuvre of visible analysis is “Stained,” which Arieli in contrast in philosophy to up to date dance. “Classical dance is very rigid,” he stated. “You get rewarded for being within the rules and [excelling] in the structure, in the frame. And contemporary dance is about breaking the rules.”

So are these portraits. The topics’ faces are sometimes obscured, or their eyes closed. Their our bodies are principally naked, and only one hand is painted, stained from wrist bone to fingertips in black, grey or pink. The dancers typically seem in duos, and it’s not all the time clear whose limbs are whose. They’re flexing their muscle tissue, but additionally embracing and supporting each other.

“There’s playfulness in the idea of what a man is,” stated Ori Manor, a current Juilliard grad and Batsheva Ensemble dancer who posed for “Stained.” He was significantly moved by a recurring motif within the photos: a person being carried or held. “There’s no answer to what masculinity is,” he stated. “You can tell by the pictures, there’s so many different kinds.”

Instagram removed certainly one of Arieli’s “Stained” photos, even though each males had been clearly carrying dance belts, the standard undergarments of a male dancer. Arieli was shocked. He’s by no means been involved in nude images, he defined, and his photos aren’t meant to be erotic. “It’s definitely about intimacy. It’s not about sexual performance of any kind,” he stated. “This is the first time my work got censored.”

He chalks it as much as the error of an algorithm. Probably.

But, he admitted, “we still live in a conservative society, and many people are uncomfortable with the really simple idea that I’m trying to present here: that masculinity does have many shades, and that gentle masculinity is beautiful and should be encouraged from a young age.”

“We should all be able to look at it and appreciate it,” he stated. “And as long as I have the opportunity, I will show it.”