Portrait of a psyche in flux: photographer Shane Rocheleau on white American masculinity

  • Emma Latham Phillips

Currently, women are being told they can change history, while white men seem doomed to repeat it. For It's Nice That I wrote a long-form feature on Shane Rocheleau's photobook, "You are Masters of the Fish and Birds and All the Animals". His photography beautifully explores the identity crisis that white American men are facing. The picture he paints is not one of jostling jocks, but of characters who are deeply anxious. Shane comments, "White America’s masculine expectations — to be violently strong, sexually aggressive and entitled, a successful homesteader, a rational patriarch — yield in its extreme, repressed, aggressive, paranoid men and subservient, scared, victimised women and minorities."

https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/shane-rocheleau-you-are-the-master-of-the-fish-and-birds-and-all-the-animals-photography-publication-090818