Bryan Camillo is one of those artists who work in a variety of mediums: still photography, fiction, sketch art, and short films. He felt like an outsider growing up, a stranger no matter where he lived, mainly because of being biracial. His work emerges from that experience.

His nude photography of men is often erotic, but not overtly pornographic. Where is that line? In his work, Bryan draws on a variety of outsider experiences. He sees beyond an immediate impulse and relies on his own deep intuition.

Q: Talk about where you grew up. What were your early creative expressions?

A: I was born in Ohio, but technically I had no home base. There was a stretch before high school where my family didn’t stay in one place for more than a few school years at a time. I saw a lot of different places and never really felt welcome or at home anywhere. My parents didn’t encourage me to seek out an art career, but they were positive when they’d see me drawing pictures and stuff like that. As I grew older, that developed into a love for writing. Photography at that point was very expensive, so my practice with that didn’t come until much later. We were a blue collar family, and their attitude was, okay, join the Army, get a job, that kind of thing.

Q: This was in Cincinnati?

A: At the beginning, yes. I was born in Cincinnati. My mother was in the military and my father worked in Detroit. My mother eventually moved my brother and I to California, and we bounced around from apartment to apartment. I would fly back and forth from Sacramento to Detroit. Up until third grade, I was at a new school every year.

Q: Because your mother was moving with the military?

A: I forgot the reasons. All I remember about Cincinnati in the 1970s is that it felt like an abandoned crumbling place. Otherwise, I think I had a typical pre-1980s childhood: I would just wander around the neighborhood left to my own devices while my parents struggled with work. There was a lot of freedom in that, but it was also kind of lonely at times.

Q: So where did you end up going to high school?

A: Sacramento. I stayed in regular high school until sophomore year. Then I spent time in what they call continuation school because, apparently, I was a problem child. I was definitely an emo nerd. I didn’t like high school. Junior high was hell, but high school was better. But it’s kind of funny, because I ended up going to my 20th class reunion, and everyone remembered me.

Q: Then what happened?

A: After my high school years, I loafed around for a while. Moved up to Washington and Oregon, experienced the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. Moved back to Sacramento until 9/11. In Sacramento, I lived in an area people called Lavender Heights, around Midtown. That was a predominantly gay area. I think that was my favorite time. I was still learning so much about myself.

Q: In Sacramento, were you focused on a creative pursuit, or was it more about coming out and being young and gay in an urban location?

A: First, I was still writing, but I also had a job at a camera shop. It was here I started taking photography seriously. Mainly because working with film as a medium wasn’t as expensive when you worked at a photolab!

Second, I’ve never had issues about my gayness. Besides the slightly awkward first coming out with friends, it just didn’t matter, because the people I hung with were misfits themselves. So, I’ve never really come out, because I’ve never been “in.”

The main struggle that I dealt with came from growing up as a biracial person in the United States. My identity was a mystery to me. And because I was moving around so much, I never really felt grounded no matter where I was. The question that I would always hear was, “What are you?” I don’t hear that question as much anymore. It’s just not cool or PC to ask it. “What are you?” A human being? I don’t know.

Growing up, I felt disconnected from everything and everyone, but at the same time connected to everything and everyone. This pain guides me. It’s like I’m outside of the circle looking in at other people’s issues. That has bled into how I write and how I create things. In fact, looking back, my sexuality was the reminder, when I engaged in it, that I was a human being and not just a racially ambiguous man that seemed to make people nervous. Just walking into a room was a provocation. But my sexuality is in the bedroom and that’s it. The culture of the LGBT community is often just as foreign to me as what’s in my blood.

Q: But I think it’s at the core of your creativity. I’m wondering how you used that dynamic to express yourself?

A: Art saved my life in a lot of ways. Other people in my family took their issues to darker places. I was able to actually express my pain with writing at first.

There was a time where I felt unmoored. It wasn’t until I met my first love that that changed. He was from a completely different world. He encouraged me to write like no one in my family ever had. That particular relationship opened me up to the world that had been closed off to me growing up. There wasn’t a lot of support in my life. That’s not an unusual thing for a lot of people. I escaped into writing, mostly. And sketch art. I got older and experimented with shooting film a little, shitty movies and photography.

Then I made my first script. It was called *drift. I wrote the script, and that had a lot of the pain that I was going through at the time. It was a typical student film, shot in black and white, with everyone smoking cigarettes, implied drug use, someone committing suicide, that kind of thing.

Q: Your basic stuff, yeah.

A: Yeah, basic stuff. Requirements for the first couple of films. It was a rollercoaster time. But as I got older and I moved to Los Angeles, I was more focused on working just to get by. Adulting happened.

Q: In these different pursuits, you were not pursuing the commercial game, like getting an agent and publishing novels, or making movies and entering them in dozens of film festivals, or trying to sell your photography of men in a gallery.

A: Truth be told, I do enjoy what I can do when I have money. But I’ve learned, especially in the last five years since becoming a massage therapist, that the system as a whole is designed not to work well with outliers or those that aren’t wired to hustle. As a professional artist, you have to be able to sell yourself to buyers who are hellbent to buy you at a discount. In a sea of art jockeys screaming “Look at me,” how does a newbie stand out? It’s an old story.

Before massage therapy, I was working in a corporate environment. After 10 years of working in offices, I found that I didn’t enjoy it. I felt like it was not good for my mental health to be behind a desk all day. I’ll venture to say it’s not good for most people.

Right now, I am putting the feelers out for an agent or someone to represent me. I want to get off my ass and put myself out there. But it can be difficult when you’re fighting against yourself. I’m still baby-stepping it, because there is no clear road map for newbies. And with the economy and current technologies of AI and NFTs in art, it’s just a jumbled, confusing time.

Q: Did you start making those black-and-white short films when you were employed in the corporate world?

A: The first film that I did was, as I said, *drift, before I came to Southern California. That was with friends. But the first short film that I did that was actually on my own dime was a short film of men kissing. I shot that when I was between jobs. I don’t think I was even temping at the time. It was called Kiss.

Q: Yes, I’ve watched it. I enjoyed it.

A: Thank you. I shot that between jobs, lugging a cheap camera and a tripod all over LA. I was literally homeless when I was notified that it had been accepted into its one and only film festival. It was a small, intimate film, not technically proficient, but it gave me acknowledgement. Years later, most of the short films I made were self-funded affairs after I found a job again. I was inspired by the Dogme 95 movement and made a whole bunch of shorts with friends on the fly.

Q: I remember seeing a film with you and Margret Cho.

A: Oh, that was a music video. La Cara Infinita by Dorian Wood.

Q: Did this film and video work land, or is it not finished?

A: Oh, there’s a lot that I still want to do with film. But I got burned out. Lots of bureaucracy and egos. And a lot of things happened during that time. I just broke down. I didn’t want to do anything at all. It wasn’t until years later that I actually started getting back into it. The video that you referenced with Margaret Cho, that was Dorian Wood’s song, La Cara Infinita. And his inspiration for that was, I think, Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom. It was a fucked up movie, but I played a sex slave. I wasn’t behind the camera. I was in front of the camera. I was very self-conscious about my body because I was completely nude and had just lost a lot of weight. But then Margaret Cho was there nude, too. I wasn’t the only person. So in that kind of environment, I felt, okay, well, this is kind of liberating, artistically liberating. I also worked in the background on a couple of other people’s music videos. That jump-started my creativity again.

I don’t want to lose sight of what you talked about earlier, the freedom. Because knowing what the system is, the question from people who want to make money from their art is, how do you do it on your own terms without being sucked into these corporate games? I want to be able to pay my rent. I want to be able to buy food. If I get sick, I want to be able to not have to work sick. But life is short. I want to create my art and live wholly for it. People born into privilege can navigate all this easily. But what about the rest of us?

Q: Your most recent photography has focused on nude men. How did your artistic trajectory land you there?

A: As I mentioned, one of my first jobs was at a camera shop, so I was surrounded by people who had an interest in photography. Even though I wasn’t a photographer at the time, I was able to develop my eye. It ended up being another way to create and to express what was inside me. Unfortunately, I lost most of the photos from that time. My style was focused on street photography, details of shapes in buildings and structures. I loved street photography and still do it from time to time. Recently, I started shooting erotic photos.

Q: There’s a clear distinction between what you are doing and pornographic work. I’m focusing right now on the nude men. Your photographs are talking about something else than pornography typically seems to be talking about. How do you approach photographing a man?

A: I look at the human body as a landscape. That’s where my interest lies, mainly. In focusing on the details, and curves and textures of rough or smooth skin. Or hair follicles, or with my more explicit work, the way light embraces beads of sweat or semen. Though I don’t consider what I do porn, per se, a lot of what I’ve photographed lately can be considered as such. Porn is often in the eye of the beholder, or very literally is porn. (Laughs) So my online presence is often censored, like that of many erotic artists and sex workers these days. A lot of what I photograph ends up being from my gut. It’s very meditative for me when I’m behind the camera.

Q: The word I keep coming back to when I think of your photography is “tenderness.”Does that resonate with you?

A: The way I see art in general is that I want to feel something. When I’m reading something, when I’m looking at something, when I’m hearing something, I want to feel it. You can tell when something is just put together. The word “tender” is very apt for what I have been trying to do. In the book Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, the author, Chögyam Trungpa, describes how we spend most of our lives focusing in one direction, living in a cocoon. And we become stifled with the world that we create in this cocoon. That’s something that I’m also exploring with my own spirituality and art.

Since I see men’s bodies as landscapes I am not just having them pose for the camera. I want more than that. I want less than that. I want to capture the side of a person that you’re not privy to if you’re looking directly at them.

Q: In our emails, you often use the word “hermit” to describe yourself. Do you have a community of people who share all of these different interests?

A: Right now, especially due to COVID-19, I’m trying to reestablish some kind of community. But because of my interest in so many things, I get pulled in 500 different directions. I hate to say it like that, but I have an interest in photography, I have an interest in massage, I have an interest in art porn, I have an interest in writing. I’m trying to follow all of these things. But it’s still very difficult to connect when you’re not meeting in person. I’m trying to figure out how to put myself out there more.

Q: What were some early cinematic experiences?

A: I’ve always been drawn to foreign and art films. They tended to be rawer and more blunt about sexuality and violence. I do like the American style of film and grew up with B-movies and horror movies, but, when I really started to notice and savor movies, it was with films like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, or dramas like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Blue Velvet.

The first gay film I saw where it felt real, explicit, and raw was The Wounded Man (L’Homme Blessé). I really felt that one. It captured the feeling I had of not quite fitting in. It wasn’t until I was older that I actually was exposed to gay porn like the Joe Gage films from the 1970s, and Peter de Rome, and Wakefield Poole.

Q: Have you seen, by the way, the Wakefield Poole documentary?

A: Yeah, a few years back.

Q: I just saw it recently. I found it very inspirational. He has enormous setbacks and he just goes ahead and does something else. I remember his store in San Francisco, Hot Flash, very fondly.

A: Yeah. Bijou was one of my favorite porn films of all time. It’s a classic. Trippy.

Q: How do you meet your models? For example, the fellow that you’ve just photographed again, how did you come across him?

A: Zen Gōken? We were actually connected on Instagram first. He would post videos of himself in musicals. He has a really great voice. Instagram though, is very algo heavy, so you spend more time seeing ads than seeing friend’s posts.

One day, I was going through a gay photo site, and he was model of the day. I thought, “Why does he look familiar?” I realized it was him. It was weird at first, to see him like that, just ass up, just human, exposed, sexual versus what’s presented on Instagram. It totally changed the way I looked at him. I thought he was attractive before, but I thought, this is a brave man to put himself out there like that. So I sent an email and asked if I could photograph him. To my surprise, he said yes. The photo shoot was very pleasant and a learning experience. He was a sweetheart and very professional.

Q: Can you define the line between pornography and erotica?

A: Nope. I’ve given up on creating definitions like that. People that wish to suppress art will call something that offends them porn, while those that celebrate a particular piece will label it erotic or sensual. I once posted a photo on Instagram of a man wearing a fundoshi. It’s a traditional Japanese underwear. It was fine there. But when I posted the same photograph on Twitter, it was marked as “sensitive.”

I like to think of my portrait work as sensual and erotic. But on occasion it steers to blatantly homoerotic areas that’s closer to what I consider porn. I guess I could argue that my images of erections, masturbation, and semen are sensual, but ultimately those definitions will be in the eyes of the individuals and institutions that judge them.

Q: Can you tell me what’s next? I know that COVID-19 has been very hard on massage therapists and artists.

A: I have a few short film projects and photo collaborations that are in development. I’m also writing a ‘magical realist’ fiction memoir with homoerotic overtones. I’ll be writing a lot this year.

2022 was difficult but I see things improving for Massage Therapists and Masseurs. We’ll see.

I’ll be focusing on self care, self improvement, learning how to make a decent batch of beans and rice, and just taking 2023 slowly.

See more of Bryan Camillo’s work here