White cardboard boxes towered over Dennis Bell’s head. Photo negatives, some coated with footprints and dog hair, covered the floor and reels of 16-millimeter film stacked precariously on top of a washing machine. Bell bent down to pick up a slide and held it up to the light: a black-and-white portrait of a young man—almost nude except for a G-string, cowboy boots, and sombrero—riding a mule and waving a muscular arm to someone off camera, as Bell recalls in an interview recorded decades after the 2003 discovery. The image was a mere drop in the bucket, just one small piece of the two million pictures, 8,000 reels of film, and enormous boxes of props and equipment—Los Angeles photographer Bob Mizer’s life’s work—suffocating in a dim Alameda garage. Bell, then in his 30s, handsome and broad-shouldered with a striking resemblance to Aaron Eckhart, stared at the slide and then stuffed it into his pocket along with a few others. “These are mine now,” he said.
Bob Mizer (above) is credited with inspiring the work of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Tom of Finland, and David Hockney.
Mizer shot nearly every day of his 47-year-long career, often in the basement studio of his blue Craftsman-style home in Pico-Union, a neighborhood in central Los Angeles. A commercial photographer in the early 1940s, Mizer worked on sets for fitness magazines and weight-loss products. He spent his spare time at Venice’s Muscle Beach, snapping pictures of strapping young men who would eventually become the original members of the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), the modeling agency Mizer founded in 1945. AMG served two purposes: to deliver a steady pipeline of male models to Mizer’s Hollywood contacts and carve ample opportunity for Mizer to practice “physique” photography. These images were almost indistinguishable from those of bodybuilders published at the time—only Mizer’s work possessed a subtle wink to its predominantly gay audience. The photographer would publish his work in Physique Pictorial, the quarterly magazine first published in 1951 that, more than once, caused Mizer run-ins with the law for distribution of indecent imagery. That same magazine would also inspire a young David Hockney to move to Los Angeles in 1964 and start painting.
Models liked working with Mizer. They were compensated fairly and clear-eyed about the intended use of their portraits. Mizer offered the young men a place to sleep in exchange for help around the property. Several hours spent cleaning up after Mizer’s many animals—a herd that included dogs, rabbits, goats, and chickens—earned a space on one of several outdoor couches lining the pool. Over the years, it’s believed Mizer photographed over 10,000 models, including future star and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Before converting it into an office for the Bob Mizer Foundation, the Magazine was a mainstay of the Tendernob neighborhood for almost 40 years. Owner Bob Mainardi closed the shop for only three days in its history—because of power failures from the Loma Prieta earthquake.
In 2003, Bell responded to an eBay ad posted by Wayne Stanley, Mizer’s former employee, who took over the artist’s estate when he died, in 1992. Stanley was selling the archive—or what was left of it, after having tossed a sizable portion in the dumpster. He claimed he was looking for the right buyer. Bell was familiar with Mizer’s work; in the ’70s, as a teenager in rural Wisconsin, he’d found a copy of Physique Pictorial in a muddy ditch next to a cornfield on his walk to the bus stop. “I didn’t know much about my sexuality yet,” Bell says. “But I remember [the magazine] was very interesting.” Over a long dinner at Bell’s house after their initial meeting, Stanley assessed the prospective buyer, who was then running Posing Strap, a popular beefcake website, as he puttered around his El Cerrito kitchen. Bell, Stanley decided, an early internet user living in a refurbished home decorated with 1930s antique furniture, had the right blend of enthusiasm and nostalgia to carry Mizer’s torch. But also: Stanley was ready to get rid of the clutter filling his garage. “Wayne was not going to save the estate,” Bell says.
It took Bell several trips to drive the boxes from Stanley’s garage to his home, where he began the meticulous process of documenting images. Some of the film was in desperate need of restoration—Stanley had stored celluloids in trash cans—which would require more time, resources, and space than Bell’s El Cerrito home could afford.
In 2010, Bell established the Bob Mizer Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving Mizer’s work as well as that of other controversial artists. He enlisted volunteers to help with the organization process and assembled a small board of advisers. Seven years later, Bell relaunched Physique Pictorial, Mizer’s underground print portraiture magazine. The new edition would feature a mix of Mizer’s work with portraits by new physique photographers. Bell shoulders production and distribution mostly himself, launching several Kickstarter campaigns to help cover rising print costs. “This is my life,” Bell says. “Just like Mizer.”
Today, the foundation’s headquarters and the Mizer archive are located in a three-story building at 920 Larkin Street in San Francisco’s Tendernob. The 4,800-square-foot space was formerly occupied by the Magazine, a small shop that carried collectibles and, of course, magazines—including the original Physique Pictorial. Mizer was friends with the owners, Bob Mainardi and his longtime partner, Trent Dunphy, for decades. Before his death, in 2021, Mainardi dedicated the shop to the foundation and used his remaining years to transition the space. One significant change: converting the ground floor into a gallery space open to the public five days a week. Exhibitions, which Bell helps curate, often feature the work of Mizer’s contemporaries—such as the current show, Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form, featuring 25 black-and-white portraits (with heavy Mapplethorpe influence) taken by the New Orleans photographer primarily between the 1970s and ’80s.
But most often, Bell’s curatorial priority is to maintain Mizer’s relevance: The gallery’s previous exhibition, Progeny: New Visions of the Classical Form, highlighted five working photographers whose images refer to Mizer’s style through depictions of the body in playful compositions. And just this past weekend, the Go-Go’s used Mizer’s muscleman films as a backdrop to their Coachella set. The band performed their hit “Head Over Heels” to a crowd of hundreds as statuesque models flexed overhead.
“Now we have new eyes, new generations looking at Mizer’s material and finding all kinds of values that didn’t even occur to him or us,” says Dunphy, who’s still active at the foundation. “That’s the whole point.”•
Lydia Horne
Lydia Horne is the research director at Alta Journal. Her writing has appeared in Wired, Racquet Magazine, L.A. Taco, Hyperallergic, and other publications.
