ProPhotoPics’ “Through The Secret Keyhole” is a stark, thoughtful, and unforgiving look at vulnerability, masculinity, and the schism between public and private interactions in Gay Britain.

The dilapidated, peeling white paint, covered in a patina of brown and red stains, suggests the tension between the modern gay man’s public image — clean, white, immaculate, presentable — and the frank reality of his sexual needs — dirty, carnal, and earthy — as well as the figurative “white-washing” of racial minorities inside the gay community and the conflict between public acceptance and authenticity.

Condensed moisture on the window panes, obscuring the view outside the image’s frame, hints at both the lusty breathing of hidden, discrete coupling and the political temperature in which it takes place; even shelter, in this environment, is insufficient protection.

Drawing the viewer’s eyes away from this dense and suggestive periphery, however, is the centered, black rectangle of a door lock, presenting a gaping negative space which draws the attention inwards to its depths. A brass doorknob, perfect and polished as a glans, floats in this space next to the titular focus of the piece: a simple, open keyhole. The obvious Foucauvian metaphor of the vulnerability and violence implicit in sodomy is presented here as a double-edged sword; it is the locking and unlocking of a “bottom,” and the only path through the contradictions of modern homosexuality to what lies beyond the door. Only by confronting the essence of our sexuality, ProPhotoPics seems to say, can we be free.

Rating: 10/10

An ironic jab at modern cinema, Hanging out examines the letterbox as both technological artifact and framing metaphor, playfully reappropriating it in a starkly different context. The strong, vertical elements of the tree trunks serve as phallic counterpoints to the shriveled, scrotal leaves in the foreground, both of which are set against a spray of suggestive yellow. In reframing — both literally and metaphorically — a subtle reference to sexual deviance in the modernist trappings of the letterbox, ProPhotoPics breathes carnal, musky life info the heart of modern photography.

Rating: 10/10