Jessica Yatrofsky

booksigning of I Heart Boy & video screening of
I Heart Boy – The Screen Tests

Wednesday, April 27, 7pm
Free admission

Jessica Yatrofsky is a New York–based photographer, known for her work with naked men. Raised in Las Vegas, Yatrofsky began her practice by photographing male go-go dancers in strip clubs, and has photographically explored people’s bodies ever since, always with a mix of sympathy and transgression. She is a regular contributor toEast Village Boys and founder of iheartboy.com, a website dedicated to picturing young men in sweetly provocative ways. Her artwork also includes performance projects, in which audiences are confronted with her brand of nudity and sexual politics, and films that explore beauty, objectification and perception. Yatrofsky received her MFA from Parsons The New School For Design.

With an erotic softness and quiet confidence, the young, sometimes nude subjects in Yatrofsky’s first monograph, I Heart Boy, exhibit a willingness to be celebrated by all for their beauty and openness. Posing in the intimacy of their own homes, often in studio apartments in Manhattan’s East Village, Lower East Side and Brooklyn, lanky, hairless bodies are posed against the minimalist backgrounds of naturally lit rooms with sparse furnishings. Yatrofsky’s waif-like men—merely boys just a few years ago, bordering on androgynous, with an occasional tattoo and a bit of punk swagger to match their youthful naiveté—hardly resemble even the shadow of the beefcake of generations past. Ultimately, I Heart Boy is a series of portraits in the purest sense; of being simply bared as human before the world.