Visible Man: Loren Cameron's "Man Tool"

Jamison Green offers a man's POV on life in the trans lane. Opinion, advice, and information from an internationally respected leader of the FTM community.

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Loren Cameron has been scoping out hormonally modified or surgically enhanced body parts for nearly a decade, striving to create works of photographic art from the living art that transsexual bodies are. His book, "Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits" (Cleis Press, San Francisco, 1997) was and remains a powerful statement about the dignity and variety of transsexual men. Now his e-book, "Man Tool," gets more specific about FTM surgery, and also offers color images and statements from his subjects about their experience with surgery and its effects.

Color photography is very expensive to create and reproduce, and the market for transsexual genital images is rather small, so publishers are not enthusiastic about investing in the set-up and printing charges involved in creating a book of this nature. Plus, there are just not enough images of different transmen willing to display their genitals to make a physical book economically feasible. So Cameron, along with Web designer Gwen Smith, came up with an electronic book. Using a secure payment scheme, $19.95 buys prospective viewers unlimited access to the "Man Tool" site (at lorencameron.com) for 12 months, plus the option to print the book for offline viewing. Of course, the quality of printed images will depend on your printer and the type of paper you print them on, so it wouldn't necessarily be the same as a well-produced physical book or individual custom photographic prints, but it could be better than nothing.

Cameron's images in "Man Tool" include five different phalloplasties representing four different surgeons, five different metoidioplasties representing two different surgeons, four chest reconstructions representing four different surgeons and one example of nonsurgical genital change effected by hormones alone. Each of the 15 subjects describes something about his surgery and how the results have affected him, and the surgeons are identified. I was very interested to find out that the one chest reconstruction (Rico) that used liposuction with the intention of retaining the original nipples resulted (as expected) in retaining full sensation, but that sensation was not experienced as erotic. What was not clear from the account is whether Rico experienced a change in erotic sensation postoperatively, or whether he had never experienced his nipple sensation as erotically charged.

It is possible to find images of FTM genital reconstruction or hormonal alteration on the Net for free. Some pretty amazing things are visible on or through links from the FTM Phalloplasty Information Hub, or on Transster. Another interesting site is "About Us: the FTM Surgery Page", where there are no photos, but a series of tables showing the responses to a number of questions about surgeons, costs, satisfaction rates and aspects of results. Numbers of participants or respondents in all of these offerings are relatively small, but it is not surprising that it is difficult to get people to display their private parts, even anonymously. The quality of images on the free sites vary greatly (though most are quite adequate for examining content).

Even in Cameron's "Man Tool" e-book, although the images are all well-lit, well-framed, in focus, beautiful and informative, they are (with the exception of one image) so anonymous and close to the body -- no eyes or any other kind of human expression is present to carry any emotion -- that there is not much to distinguish them as art. The one exception is a self-portrait of Cameron himself, which conveys the artist's style and vision with the kind of classic power and grace of an athlete depicted on an early Etruscan urn. This is the only image that shows a torso with a head, and even in his stylized pose, Cameron's face in profile adds a human dimension that all the other headless torsos lack. Preserving the anonymity of a subject in order to focus on something so intimate as genitals (or chests) seems to work against the viewer's perception of the subject as a full human being. In "Man Tool," it's the brief texts that give life to the images and add that dimension to make the e-book worthwhile. Other (free) sources of images do not give such consistent information. They don't always say who the surgeon was, how long after the surgery the photo was taken, or give any data about postoperative satisfaction or complications. It's good to see as much of this stuff as you can if you are contemplating surgery, but it's dangerous to assume anything about what your own results will be like based on one or two images, no matter who made them.

Body parts can make great art, even in isolation from any specific emotional information, but I think black and white images with more grayscale variation lend themselves to that kind of interpretation better than color. "Man Tool's" images are, on the whole, more didactic, more informative, than they are inspirational. But maybe I've seen too many surgeries! It is certainly worth the investment of less than 20 dollars to support the work of an artist whose full body of work to date has done an invaluable service for the transsexual community. There is real quality here, in the images, in the information and in the presentation of "Man Tool." I do think it's just the tip of the iceberg, though. As Cameron says in his introduction, "Man Tool" is "by no means definitive, or even scientific." And "clearly there is room for more, but I'll leave the rest to the physicians who are performing these procedures."

That surgery is also an art form, and a scientifically demanding one. The personal goals of each of us who seeks chest or genital reconstruction are not to be dismissed or erased in one-size-fits-all philosophies. Every body is different, and every body deserves a chance to function at his or her best. Every body deserves respect and love, including transsexual bodies. Cameron's photographic and artistic work continues to help make respect and love for transsexual bodies a reality.