Cult of Boys — Androgyny, Intimacy, Icon

This photobook by Toyin Ibidapo, Cult of Boys, published by teNeues in 2011, is part of the Darwin Bookshop because it distills a particular vision of masculinity rarely seen in contemporary portraiture — intimate, androgynous, and unguarded. Ibidapo’s lens focuses on a generation of boys not yet hardened by performance. Many are musicians, artists, drifters, dressed in eyeliner or nothing at all, their gaze fixed somewhere between seduction and fragility.

The work evokes the spirit of youth scenes — glam, punk, indie — but subtracts the noise, the pose, the stage. What remains is a quiet eroticism: boys as muse, as self-invention, as archetype. Tim Walker’s foreword situates the book in the lineage of subcultural glamour, but it’s Ibidapo’s own photographic language — soft grain, bare skin, shadows like fabric — that builds its world. Cult of Boys belongs in the archive as a visual thesis on the shifting codes of gender, beauty, and style in the early 21st century.

Technical Sheet

Title: Cult of Boys
Artist / Author: Toyin Ibidapo
Foreword: Tim Walker
Date: 2011
Technique / Printing Method: Colour offset printing
Medium / Materials: Hardcover
Dimensions: Approx. 25 x 32 cm
Pages: Unspecified
Publisher / Editor: teNeues Verlag GmbH + Co. KG
ISBN: 978-3-8327-9531-3
Language: English
Condition: New