Cowboy Joe (Tom of Finland series)
Produced in 2003, “Cowboy Joe” belongs to a series of chromogenic prints by New York-based photographer Joe Oppedisano (b. 1957) that engage directly with the visual legacy of Tom of Finland — the pseudonym of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen (1920–1991), whose highly stylized homoerotic drawings of idealized male figures became among the most recognizable icons of twentieth-century queer visual culture. Oppedisano’s photographic series translates Tom of Finland’s drawn archetypes — the cowboy, the biker, the sailor — into the medium of color photography, preserving the genre’s iconographic vocabulary while grounding it in the specificity of the photographic body.
The image depicts a young male subject styled within the American cowboy tradition: the type that Tom of Finland rendered repeatedly across five decades as a figure of physical confidence and erotic possibility. The chromogenic process — a silver dye-bleach method that produces saturated, stable color — lends the print a surface brilliance that reinforces its debt to commercial and advertising photography, a register Tom of Finland himself often engaged with. At 26.5 × 26.5 cm on paper (35.50 × 28.00 cm sheet, 53.50 × 48.00 cm framed), the square format gives the composition a measured, considered quality distinct from the elongated proportions of Tom of Finland’s own drawings.
This example is number 4 from an edition of 25. Imago Dei presents this work as part of its engagement with the photographic tradition that grew from and in dialogue with gay graphic culture of the late twentieth century — a field in which Oppedisano occupies a consistent and documented position.
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