“I can certainly not explain why I love heterosexual men so much,” writes Thai artist Ohm Phanphiroj in the foreword to his new photobook Desire — only to immediately detail what he finds sexy about straight guys: “Their ease in their own skin, their pursuit of women, their vulgarity, their rawness, and their secret craving for attention from queer men. For my attention!”
In Desire, Phanphiroj has harnessed this desire for attention. For the photo book, which carries the flirtatious subtitle Straight Men in My Bedroom, the artist photographed eleven of his heterosexual friends naked. Across 176 pages, he erects a monument to these young men that is at once a personal love letter and a reflection on the core of his artistic practice.
The Simultaneity of Intimacy and Inaccessibility
Even though Phanphiroj has gained international recognition as a fashion and landscape photographer, the subject closest to his heart remains the male nude. The tension between physical closeness and emotional distance between models and photographer had already been central in his first photobook The Space Between Us (review on TheColu.mn: “A Map of Erotic Encounters”). Now Phanphiroj sharpens the simultaneity of intimacy and inaccessibility even more pointedly in Desire.
“I photograph straight men because they are the missing puzzle pieces in my life — something I can never permanently have, truly possess, or ever be,” the photographer says. He does not view this approach as an act of submission, but as a give-and-take between himself and his models. “They offer themselves to me — for a brief, intimate moment — and in return I make them immortal. I capture their beauty with my lens before time erases them — before their bodies sag, their hairlines recede, and their youth fades. Before they are no longer desirable.”
The Celebration of One’s Own Desires
In a detailed afterword to Desire, art historian Hunter O’Hanian places the book’s concept within a timeless artistic context. “The bodies of the depicted men are lean and well-defined, with pronounced musculature and narrow waists. Few are under thirty,” O’Hanian describes the book’s subjects. He continues: “Athletic, yet they seldom conform to the ideal of bulky muscleheads (…). They also lack the dangerous, almost threatening expression that the men David Hurles (1944–2023) staged in his works. They recall the classical male body type—perfected in ancient Greece and later revisited in Roman times and during the Renaissance.”
According to O’Hanian, Phanphiroj’s nude portraits of straight men are comparable to European religious paintings of the 16th century — “those visual worlds that have inspired gay men for centuries.” For the artist himself, the Desire photographs, created between 2022 and 2025 in his hometown of Bangkok, are also a call not to suppress one’s own desires but to celebrate them. Thus Phanphiroj closes his foreword with the exhortation: “Live with passion. Love without restraint. Dream intensely. Desire without compromise.”
Desire is published by Salzgeber. The photobook, along with many other compelling non-heteronormative art books, novels, and DVDs, is available at Salzgeber.Shop.
Book Information
Ohm Phanphiroj: Desire — Straight Men in My Bedroom. Photobook. 176 pages. 131 color illustrations. With a foreword by Hunter O’Hanian. Salzgeber. Berlin 2025. Hardcover: $59. ISBN 978-3-95985-741-3.
Gallery: Desire — Straight Men in My Bedroom
13 Images
