Where Body Becomes Dream: Bert Van Pelt in Inspiró Magazine Issue 2
Skin caught in half-light. A body that seems to hover between weight and weightlessness. These are the first impressions that Bert Van Pelt's photographs leave, and they do not leave quickly. The Belgian photographer has built a body of work around the male nude that feels less like documentation and more like a kind of waking reverie, which is precisely why his inclusion in Inspiró Magazine Issue 2, the Winter 2025 collectible print edition from The Male Muse, feels so entirely earned.
Van Pelt works from Liège, Belgium, a city that carries its own atmospheric weight, and it shows. His photographs of the male nude are neither simply portraits nor simply bodies. They exist somewhere in between, in a charged, suspended state where flesh becomes form, where a shoulder blade or the curve of a hip becomes something closer to landscape than anatomy. His images are both static and fluid at once, a paradox that is very much intentional. As he describes it himself, male nudity is his form of expression par excellence, and he approaches it through a rigorous conceptual lens that refuses to let the work settle into the merely decorative.
That commitment to conceptual depth is what separates Van Pelt from photographers who simply document the male body. He places his subjects in what he calls a committed and aesthetic context, a phrase that carries real weight. To be committed in art is to take a position, to refuse neutrality, to insist that the image means something beyond its surface. His visual research, the sustained, evolving inquiry at the heart of his practice, is precisely what has allowed him to renew the genre of the male nude time and again, bringing it fully into the conversation of contemporary fine art photography.
The series and bodies of work on his website, bertvanpelt.com, read like chapters in an ongoing poem written in light and skin. Projects titled Inner Dialogues, Equilibria, (e)MOTION, Burning, Essence, and Confusion each suggest an emotional or philosophical terrain rather than a purely visual one. The titles are not accidental. They hint at interiority, at the idea that the male body, so often rendered as purely external spectacle, contains multitudes, that it carries feeling and contradiction and desire and doubt. Van Pelt's camera goes looking for those things, and it finds them.
His connection to the platform BOYS! BOYS! BOYS!, the celebrated gallery and publication dedicated to gay and queer fine art photography, speaks to the broader community of which his work is a part. Represented by this platform, his photographs have traveled beyond Belgium to be exhibited and published across Europe, including multiple appearances at the prestigious Festival Arles Exposition Off in France, a series of exhibitions at the Centre de Création Chorégraphique Luxembourgeois in collaboration with choreographer Saeed Hani, and features in several landmark queer art publications. His 2020 book New Men and his 2023 book (e)MOTION stand as two of the more tangible markers of a career that has moved steadily from the regional to the international.
It is precisely this caliber of vision that makes his inclusion in Inspiró Issue 2 feel so right. Inspiró, published through The Male Muse, is not simply a magazine. It is a collectible print object, over one hundred pages of contemporary queer art spanning photography, digital art, collage, illustration, and more, featuring twelve international artists whose practices orbit questions of male sensuality, identity, and form. Issue 2 deepens the exploration that the debut issue began, expanding its cast of contributors while sharpening its aesthetic ambitions. The result, as readers have already noted, is a publication that is simultaneously refined and raw, a combination that mirrors the very qualities of Van Pelt's own photographs.
To hold Inspiró Issue 2 is to hold something that understands why beauty and provocation are not opposites. Van Pelt has spent his career proving exactly that. His images drift between the dreamy and the urgent, between softness and intensity, and they do so without apology. They ask you to stay with them. They reward patience. In a media landscape that moves faster than the eye can follow, his photographs insist on slowness, on looking again, on noticing what you missed the first time.
You can explore Bert Van Pelt's full body of work at bertvanpelt.com and follow his ongoing practice on Instagram at @bertvanpelt. Inspiró Magazine Issue 2 is available now through The Male Muse at themalemuse.store. It ships worldwide, with the exception of the USA. Please note that US customers will need to order from The Male Muse Blurb Store due to current regulations.
