Karma presents Alphabet, an exhibition of cyanotypes by Peter McGough, open from November 1 to December 21, 2024, at 172 East 2nd Street. 

McGough’s twenty-six cyanotypes model the characters of the Roman alphabet using the nude male body. From A to Z, men pose, alone or in groups, as letters: an outstretched arm and folded leg make an F, two figures carrying a third comprise an H, a pair of couples lean on each other, forming an M. Some of the men wear flower crowns, others are unadorned. In this exhibition, these inky-blue images hang alphabetically in two tight rows above a shelf, from which a curtain falls. McGough’s installation, based on the interiors of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s modernist 291 gallery, transforms the present into something closer to the past, creating a phantasmagorical space outside of time.

Invented in 1842, cyanotype is only one of the many antique printing techniques—platinum-palladium, gum, and salt among them—that McGough has employed since 1980, when he first began making paintings, photographs, and installations exploring intersections of history, popular culture, and gay life. The cyanotype engages light only in the spectrum of ultraviolet and blue, creating spectral, painterly images that reflect what cannot be perceived by the naked eye. Here, McGough uses the nineteenth-century process to render images inspired, in part, by classical sculpture. Hearkening back to Ancient Greece, with its ideals of athleticism, balance, and beauty, his nudes evoke a period in which intimate male partnerships, both sexual and intellectual, were central to cultural life. 

With Alphabet, his first exhibition under his own name and his first in New York in nearly a decade, McGough combines his obsession with outmoded technologies with his long-standing interest in and use of ornate historical typefaces. The concept of an alphabet rendered using the human form is itself historical, dating back to at least the eighteenth century. McGough’s version of this typographical idiom is unabashedly queer—taken in his Canal Street studio some fifteen years ago, these staged photographs celebrate the beauty of the masculine form, capturing every taut muscle needed to hold the pose. Describing McGough’s practice, critic Alex Jovanovich writes: “His art is simultaneously alien and anachronistic, like a series of transmissions from some antebellum (i.e., pre-Stonewall) homo universe.” With Alphabet, McGough prompts us to forget the real world and step with him into fantasy.