Universal Hunks: 1895-1975

David L. Chapman is the author of 12 books on male photography and bodybuilding, including American Hunks(2009). But it turns out musclemen aren't purely an American or even Western phenomenon. Chapman shows through his collection of hunks from over 70 countries--from Zulu warriors to Japanese acrobats and Indian bodybuilders--that men like muscles (and for others to admire them) around the globe. We selected some of the images that helped with the discourse on sexuality and homosexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that, as Douglas Brown explains in the book's Foreward, "musclemen and their photographers created images that seem to confound categorization and were created because they were desirable."

Universal Hunks is available now.