Jim French (photographer)

Luger years

French was formally trained at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art from 1950 to 1954 and went on active duty in the United States Army in 1955, having been in the reserves for two years prior to his enlisting. He was honorably discharged from the service in 1957. French settled in New York and pursued a successful career in fashion illustration. At the suggestion of an Army contact who had seen some of his early, mostly unpublished homoerotic drawings done under the name Arion, he and French formed a partnership to start a mail order company they named "Luger." This brand was chosen because of the strong suggestions of masculinity associated with the German Luger pistol.

While the Arion drawings had been romantic and glamorized sketches of Fire Island life and similar scenes (influenced by two of his favorite artists, George Petty and Alberto Vargas), the drawings he produced for "Luger" shifted over to male icons like bikers, cowboys, wrestlers and other hypermasculine subjects. When his art was featured on the cover and inside several issues of Mars, sales increased.

Because of legal restraints of the time, the earliest works did not contain frontal nudity but were nonetheless erotic and humorously creative in their suggestiveness. French's artwork was comparable to what Athletic Model Guild and Tom of Finland produced at the time. He also began offering prints of photographs he had taken as references for his drawings, and these too sold well.

COLT Studio

Eventually French’s partner bought out his share of Luger, freeing French and a new partner, Lou Thomas, to establish another business called COLT Studio (again, a reference to a firearm, although before long, this image association was scrapped in favor of a young stallion logo). Having worked for nearly a year to produce the first drawings and photographs to be offered by the new company, Colt was begun in late 1967. Once more the images were offered in sets of prints by mail and the company quickly became successful. But after fifteen years in New York, often traveling to California to take advantage of the weather and abundance of models, French decided to move west.

In 1974 he bought out his partner’s share of the business leaving Lou Thomas to start, briefly, his own company (Target Studio). French made his home in the Hollywood Hills. From the COLT Studio offices in San Fernando Valley, he continued to run the most successful male physique photography company in America, marketing his work to gay men. For thirty-six years, COLT Studio offered the highest quality male erotica commercially available.

Longhorns - Dance

One illustration of French's, entitled 'Longhorns - Dance', achieved worldwide notoriety when it was appropriated by the late Sex Pistols manager and fashion designer Malcolm McLaren in 1975 as the basis for artwork for a T-shirt sold through Sex, the King's Road boutique McLaren operated with Vivienne Westwood.

Depicting two cowboys facing each other, each naked from the waist down apart from their boots, 'Longhorns – Dance' was initially sold as one of a pack of six 5″ x 7″ prints in 1969. Reproduced in the book The Colt Album, published in Britain by John S. Barrington in 1973, its appearance in issue 7 of French’s magazine Manpower!, published in 1974, piqued McLaren’s interest when he acquired a copy in a shop on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.

McLaren added imagined dialogue between the two figures to express “the frustration and boredom I felt at the time”. Alan Jones, a friend of McLaren's, was the first person to wear the design in public, and was promptly arrested and charged with “showing an obscene print in a public place” under the Vagrancy Act of 1824.

The following day Sex was raided by the police, who impounded shirts bearing the design. Indecency charges were levelled at McLaren. The uproar became a freedom of speech issue when Labour MP Colin Phipps called on Home Secretary Roy Jenkins to review the outmoded law. “It would appear to me to be more logical for a prosecutor to have to demonstrate a specific public hurt in matters of taste rather than being able to rely on antique laws,” Phipps wrote to Jenkins.

Despite the outcry, Jones was fined and McLaren was arraigned to appear in court and was also later fined.

Subsequently when the 'Cowboys' T-shirt was worn by members of the Sex Pistols such as Sid Vicious, French's illustration became one of the key visual provocations of the punk movement, though French was not impressed when Westwood continued to reproduce the image with McLaren's dialogue.

In 2011, French's spokesman Nat Gozzano told blogger Paul Gorman: “The whole drawing was simply jacked. The illustration was drawn by Jim French well before McLaren and Westwood made a whole bunch of money (and still do apparently) stealing it.”

Later life/exhibitions

In his final years, French resided in Palm Springs and offered limited edition art prints from his photographic archives. Exhibitions of his work included 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor' at New York gallery Clampart. French also participated in 'The Photography of Punk', an exhibition curated by Nick Knight at the British photographer's London gallery space SHOWStudio. In 2014, 'Jim French: BC (Before Colt)' at Nat Reed in Palm Springs exhibited French's early illustrative and design work for such clients as Columbia Records and fabric house Tammis Keefe.