Presented for the first time at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, the ‘Romantic Boys’ series is a sequence of still and moving staged portraits which lean on cliches of masculinity, and ties them with tropes of romance to create camp and celebratory images of men.

Since birth, we’ve been fed images of smoking cowboys, muscle men, hairy chests and fast cars as symbols of virile masculinity. Furthermore ,we’ve been told wedding proposals should be on one knee at sunset, to ‘say it with flowers’, and women’s magazines constantly nudge at us about keeping things ‘exciting in the bedroom’.

This series is an observation on what we’ve been sold as the perfect combination of hard and soft, the ‘ultimate man’. But when combined these images come off as a camp, sometimes sleazy and often tongue in cheek exploration of what it’s like to be the ultimate man in love.

“It’s John Wayne taking a bubble bath by candlelight.”