July 14, 1932 – June 16, 2017

Jim French was an American illustrator and photographer who created the male erotic photography studio Colt Studio, as well as its two predecessors, Arion Studio and The Loger Studio. He was another creative who spent time on Fire Island.

French was born on July 14, 1932, and quickly developed a taste for the fine arts. He attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Art from 1950 to 1954 with an eye towards a career in fashion illustration along the lines of J.C. Leyendecker. Following college, he enlisted in the Army, serving for two years and earning an honorable discharge. With photography quickly taking the place of fashion illustration advertising, French became a freelance advertising illustrator.

In his spare time, French began creating romantic homoerotic illustrations under the pseudonym Arion, largely in the period from 1964-65.

I

In early-1966,

French’s illustrations under the Arion name were first offered via mail order by Arion Studio, based in New York City. It is unknown if this was a solo venture run by French or a precursor to The Loger Studio, but the venture was short-lived, resulting in only one mailing. French’s Arion drawings were also offered in 1966 via Ed Wild’s Times Square Studio.

In mid-1966, French was approached by an old Army friend Saul Stollman, who was aware of French’s Arion drawings, to create a physique studio, again operated out of New York City. The two went into business as The Loger Studio. For this business venture, French adopted a new pseudonym Kurt Luger, and his new illustrations exhibited a more masculine aesthetic, featuring cowboys, leathermen, wrestlers and other similar archetypes. Indeed, the name Lger, sans the superfluous umlaut that French added as an artistic flourish, was selected to evoke the German pistol. The illustrations French produced in this time were largely based on Polaroid reference photos he took of male nude models, and this led him to also venture into photography.

The Loger Studio quickly experienced success after being featured on the cover and in the pages of Kris Studios’ Mars and other physique magazines. French quickly became suspicious of Stollman’s failure to handle the business end of the studio, however, and hired his friend Lou Thomas on August 8, 1967 to look into the business side. By October 1967, Thomas was so frustrated by the mess that he left Colt Studio, and within a month French and Stollman had agreed that Stollman should buy out French and lead Loger forward on his own. Stollman would make a final buyout payment to French in February 1968, but carried on briefly on his own, featuring at least one illustration photo set by himself and a few photographs and 8mm films created by other substandard producers. No further reference to Loger is known beyond 1968.

On December 1, 1967

Jim French and Lou Thomas discussed starting their own studio together and on December 5, 1967, the pair took out a business license to form Colt Studio. Like Lger, Colt Studio was named to evoke the image of a pistol, but very quickly the studio morphed its Colt image into the model of a young stallion.

For the Colt venture, French assumed the new pseudonym Rip Colt, with the Rip portion of the name being inspired by the physique photographer Rip Searby. The first several years of the studio saw Colt sticking to the model of releasing French’s illustrations under the Rip Colt name, photo sets featuring masculine male models, and eventually 8mm short films, magazines and calendars. For its first six years, Colt Studio was based out of New York City, but French traveled so frequently to Southern California that he eventually relocated Colt to Studio City, California in 1974. Concurrent with this change, French bought out Lou Thomas’ share in the company, freeing Thomas to branch out on his own and form Target Studios.

Colt Studio would eventually grow into one of the most successful gay erotic photography studios of its time. The company was famed not only for its stable of male models, but for its long-running magazine brands which included Manpower, Colt Men, Spurs, and Colt Studio Presents, as well as its calendars. Jim French continued to run the company until 2003, when former Falcon Studios director John Rutherford and his business partner Tom Settle purchased the Colt name and rebranded the company the Colt Studio Group. For a few years after his sale of the company, French continued to privately sell salon prints of his photographs, but he has since settled into a quiet retirement. The Colt Studio Group continues to feature much of French’s work on their website, but the company’s focus now is more on creating hardcore homoerotic video content.

Life Thru a Lens Jim French: In His Own Words:

I went to the Philadelphia Museum School of Art for four years, and then I went on active duty in the service for two years. I took my basic training at Fort Knox, Ky. I think Baghdad today is probably similar to what that was like. Then I was stationed in Fort Mead, Md. I met all kinds of people I’d never met before, and I was glad I did it. I had been in the reserves for two years previous to that, so I went in as a noncommissioned officer and became the pianist for the officers’ glee club. At the time, if you had told me that later I’d say I was glad I did this, I would’ve laughed really hard. But in a way it prepared me for Colt because I had to deal with people that were not in my sphere. After the service I went to New York and worked freelance. I had an office on Madison Avenue, and I worked for BBDO, Young and Rubicam, and all of those high-end advertising agencies. I drew everything from storyboards for commercials to comps for ads. And from that I got an agent and I started doing fashion drawings for Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf. I was happy doing that; it was very lucrative. This was in the ’60s in New York, and storyboards were quite new. I drew enough tubes of Crest toothpaste to last me a lifetime.

Then I ran into a friend whom I’d met in the army, and we had dinner and he asked me what I was doing and I told him. I don’t know why he said it, because he was not gay, and in hindsight, it’s not a gay statement, if you consider the time in which it was said, he said, “Why don’t you do drawings of bodybuilders and we’ll sell the reproductions.” And that’s the germ of it all. I certainly was not going to give up my day job. So I kept doing what I was doing professionally and then I did a set of, I think it was initially six drawings. I came up with the name Lüger because I liked the way the word looked. I thought the umlaut was interesting, and it just seemed to be a masculine icon. So we went with that. In those days, there were very few avenues for this kind of art. People today don’t realize what the climate was like in the late ’60s. When I started Lüger, frontal nudity was considered obscene. Early photographers such as Lon in New York were being prosecuted if their pictures showed a glimpse of pubic hair peeking over a posing strap. This was very, very restrictive. It wasn’t until around the early ’70s that through a Supreme Court decision frontal nudity per se could not be considered obscene — thereby validating all the great masters who had painted nudes. It was awfully generous and considerate of the Supreme Court to validate what everyone from Caravaggio and Michelangelo had done.

Joe Weider was starting up in those days. He had an office in New Jersey and he was publishing some low-grade “gay” publications like Young Adonis. They were fairly large-sized publications; everyone was of course completely covered, but for that particular clique who was into body worship, it functioned OK. I think most people knew what it was, but in those days “gay” was not on the radar. There was so much subterfuge that you didn’t acknowledge it. I suppose it was the golden age of masochists, because if you wanted to really make your life a living hell, you could be obviously gay. Ask Quentin Crisp. When a book came out, like The Well of Loneliness, it was a scandal. Copies of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn had to be smuggled in from Europe. Today it would be book of the month club on Oprah. It was a very restrictive time. So I started doing these drawings and we were able to place a few ads in Weider publications and were just amazed at the response. They were not frontal nude, but they were sexy. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that when you see it all, it’s not as sexy as when you let your mind create what you want to be there. Was I surprised by the response to my images? Yes. My partner and I had no idea that this was going to happen. It was a long shot. I did another series of drawings. My partner at the time was a very intelligent person, but basically, he was not a good businessman. It became clear to me within six months that I could create the product and it would be popular, but he was not following through in filling orders and doing what is required for a business. So we came to an agreement, and in 1967 he bought me out.

Around this time, I had met someone in New York whose name was Lou Thomas, and Lou Thomas was somebody whom everybody liked. He was part of the leather milieu, but he was intelligent and bright and he knew that it wasn’t working out with my other partner. So after I was bought out of Lüger, Lou Thomas and I set up Colt Studio that same year, 1967. We were partners for four or five years until he took a lover that nobody could deal with and forced this person into the company. By that time we had six employees, and it wasn’t just me who couldn’t deal with Lou’s lover, it was all the other employees. So we parted company, and he started Target Studios. He only had that for a year or two, and then unfortunately became an early victim of AIDS. I decided around then that I really didn’t need a partner, I needed a business manager. By this time I had been making several trips a year from New York to California because the weather was better out west — so was skin quality — so I decided to move. The segue was fairly easy because I had met people on the West Coast when I came out to sell originals of my drawings. Just to show you how far back I go, I was in Florida on vacation — this was before I moved — and I bought a new camera that had just come out. It was called a Polaroid. One of the reasons they had introduced it in Florida was because heat was a factor in developing the pictures. I remember the black-and-white film came with two thin pieces of hinged aluminum and as soon as you took the black and white print out of the camera, you put it between those two pieces of aluminum and you put it in your armpit, so the heat would develop it. I go way back. The wheel had been invented, though.

So for the drawings that I was doing, I wanted to improve them, I wanted to get them to be more believable. Polaroids were the answer. I always thought that my work and Tom of Finland’s were apples and oranges — he did his thing and I did mine. The subject matter was the same, the approach was completely different. And I think one of the reasons is, his art was a venue for his sexuality. My drawings were a result of years of academic study, years of fine art. Ours was from completely different backgrounds, so the products were different. My approach to it was, I think, more subtle. I don’t know why, when I met him, I expected him to look like his drawings. Because it’s a truism that artists usually draw themselves. Particularly if they’re not very good draftsman. So with that in mind, I expected Tom of Finland to be this behemoth who made the ground tremble. Instead, he was a quiet, shy, sweet, dear man whom I liked immediately, in spite of his work. I would have liked him as a person if he were a ribbon clerk. He was just very nice. And then I realized after meeting him and looking at his work again that that is the world that is his id. That’s where his fantasies are. I’ve always felt that I worked in a fantasy world because the people in the drawings are polished to perfection. And in the photographs, with all due respect, they don’t look like that walking around.

Of course, lighting is one of the components. But a photograph is ultimately the photographer. That’s one reason why I’ve never wanted to do an interview, because my private life belongs to me. Where my taste is, what I try to achieve, is in the photographs. And that’s all that’s necessary to know. Of course, if you have to start with good eggs, so I tried to find people who were very attractive and then make them look as impressive as possible. I didn’t move to California until the beginning of the ’70s. The reason that I mentioned the Polaroid was because in order to get the drawings more convincing, I took my little Polaroid camera and I would hire people to pose for me. Then I would use those Polaroids as source material for the drawings to get them to look more realistic, more powerful. Back then, my models were hookers. They were better-looking back then. They had to be — there were fewer of them.

Well, I was at my house at Fire Island one summer, and it occurred to me that in the time it was taking me to do these tight renderings, I could take a photograph and sell reproductions of it. So that was the next segue from drawings to photographs.

I had no background in photography at all. But in one way, I had the best teacher because I made every mistake possible, and that’s how you learn. My first camera, after the Polaroid, was a 35mm. I still had it in my hand when I reached the bottom of the swimming pool at a house where I was photographing in Beverly Hills. I just backed up into the pool. So we started selling reproductions of the photographs. We would do ads in gay-type magazines, and we did trades for a while: We would get free ads if we let the magazine have so many pictures for their edition. But then I started feeling uneasy because I’ve always felt that because something is gay, it didn’t have to be sleazy. I am not sleazy. The way I live is not sleazy. It’s just not part of me. And that’s one reason I’m happy to retire now, because sleaze and explicitness is in, and that’s not my turf. I don’t feel comfortable with that. I’m not putting it down, I’m just saying I don’t feel comfortable with it.

My work is unique in so much as, it’s not Avedon and it’s not Nan Goldin … it’s more classical because of the background and the training. You see, I decided early on if no one ever took another photograph of a nude female, this planet would have enough of a supply to last it until the second big bang. But nobody had done forthright photographs of male nudes. George Platt Lynes had done them, but no one ever saw those during his lifetime. The best one of them all, if I had to say there was a photographer who really rang my bells, was a photographer named Clifford Coffin. He was a photographer for Neiman Marcus, and he did beautiful work. His personality, unfortunately, was irascible, and finally Neiman Marcus couldn’t get models to go to his studio.

Somehow or other, I connected with him and he showed me his private pictures, and I was just amazed. Very few of them were nudes. That wasn’t what he was interested in. He was interested in masculinity. He was interested in the erotic male. I mean, he did nudes of Yul Brynner, but they were just nudes. They weren’t anything of any consequence.

But when he did his private things, that really got to me. I’d never seen anything like that. They were beautiful, they were elegant, they were sexy. Those were things that I felt comfortable with. But as I say, he was a difficult person, and in the end he not only burned all of his pictures, he burned his house right down to the ground. He lived on Park Avenue South, and the last I heard he’d moved to Hawaii and was derelict. Sad. The reason I picked the Colt name was because it was my understanding that it was the American equivalent of the German “Lüger.” We started out with a pistol image, but soon after we started Colt Studio, I didn’t like that image. I wasn’t doing violent pictures. Although I would dip into the leather world for illustration, from time to time, it moved into the young horse pistol image. And I really thought the Colt image was fresh, it was healthier, more positive. So that’s where Colt came from. There was a model that I worked with from San Francisco, whose name was Alan Albert, and we started corresponding. He sent me pictures of himself, amateur pictures, but they were taken by someone by the name of Rip Serby. I don’t know who he was, I don’t know who he is. I never met him. I just thought that was a good name, and Colt had to become more personal — it had to become a persona. So I used Rip because there aren’t many people called Rip, even today. People seemed to like the work well enough to buy it. It gave me the financial stability to say goodbye to fashion illustration. I had been very fortunate with the timing element. When I started doing this, the gay rose was just starting to bud, so I was able to go with it and see it begin to flower. Working for Colt Studio allowed Jim French to work also. That’s why I was able to please myself and do what I wanted to do and be creative for Colt Studio. Since the photograph is ultimately the photographer, my work is ultimately me. My work was a distillation of my life. And my life is a unique life, like everybody’s. So it’ll be somebody else and it’ll be their life that they’ll project. I wish them well. By Advocate.com Editors June 29 2017

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