Karlheinz Weinberger

Karlheinz Weinberger spent over 60 years producing intimate, often homoerotic photographs of rebellious male youth, including models and other working-class men. A self-taught photographer, Weinberger spent his days working in the warehouse at Zurich’s Siemens factory and his nights shooting portraits of construction workers, bikers, and athletes for the underground gay journal Der Kreis; he published these images under the pseudonym Jim. In 1958 he began focusing his camera on the Halbstarken, an edgy, antiauthoritarian teen subculture whose members styled themselves as bad boys à la James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Elvis Presley, capturing their lives with an ethnographer’s sensibility. Dressed in denim and pompadours, his smoldering teen subjects are seen smoking, wrestling, and showing off for the camera, but are also caught in more tender moments, engrossed in private conversations or snuggling up to their girlfriends.