Expressing His Kinky Side: Mark Alan Shoots the Cover of SNIFF Magazine, Scent 1

Mark Dunn
2025-12-20T03:47:00-08:00

There's a certain kind of creative restlessness that refuses to stay in one lane, and Mark Alan, the American photographer behind The Male Muse and editor of SNIFF Magazine, has never been the type to sit still.

A New Voice in Queer Publishing

SNIFF didn't arrive quietly. Described as a sanctuary for uncensored queer expression, the magazine wastes no time announcing its intentions: this is a publication that lives where fine art and fetish culture collide, and it has no interest in apology. Each issue weaves together photography, painting, illustration, and experimental visual work to explore desire in all its forms, from bondage and roleplay to gear, sneakers, and intimacy of every stripe.

For its debut issue 'Scent 1' Mark Alan not only contributed his own photography to the lineup but was behind the camera for the cover itself. It's a fitting statement of authorship: the man who conceived the magazine making his mark on its very first face.

The Cover: Safe and Bound

Gracing the cover of SNIFF, Scent 1, enjoying a deep whiff of his friend Umbra the Cyberpup's hairy pit, is Safe and Bound, a Madrid-based fetish creator who has carved out a distinct space for himself in the world of kink and alternative expression. Specializing in bondage, roleplay, and gear play, and identifying as a switch, Safe and Bound brings both dominance and vulnerability that translates powerfully through the lens.

There is something deeply deliberate about this choice. SNIFF is not a magazine about performance for an outside gaze; it's about the real world of people who live and create within fetish culture. Safe and Bound, rooted in Madrid's vibrant queer underground, embodies exactly that spirit, and Mark Alan's photography draws it out with the relaxed, naturalistic sensibility that has always defined his best work.

Find Safe & Bound at: Instagram & X
Find Umbra the Cyberpup at: Instagram & Bluesky

Inside Scent 1

The debut issue is rich with voices that feel genuinely handpicked rather than assembled. Exclusive interviews profile Spanish fetish photographer Abraham Saraya and Master Bearded Koldo, a respected presence within leather and BDSM communities, two figures who bring distinct perspectives on what it means to create and live within this world. The issue also expands into literary territory, featuring three original pieces of queer erotica by author Lawrence Schimel and multidisciplinary artist J Davies.

The full contributor roster reads like a who's who of the queer erotic underground, including J Davies, Greif Lazic, S4KINK, Ivan Bubentcov, Geartographe, Immortal By Nige, Orpheus, Yandrak, and Mark Alan himself. Scent 1 is available in both print and digital editions, with the digital version expanding the experience with over 100 additional images, work considered too raw or explicit for the printed page.

The Man Behind the Magazine

Mark Alan's path to this moment has been anything but linear, which perhaps explains why his work carries the texture of real lived experience rather than manufactured polish. Raised in a small farming community near Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, he grew up surrounded by forests and farmland but always felt drawn outward. That restless curiosity followed him to California, where he studied photography in Pasadena and later built a career spanning editorial, fashion, portraiture, and street photography.

His true creative voice, he eventually discovered, lay in photographing men, not the glossy, Adonis-like ideals that dominate so much of the genre, but something more real, more relaxed, and more revealing of who his subjects actually are. Over the years he's explored portraiture, sensual editorial series, and moments of intimate vulnerability, always with an approach that feels more like collaboration than performance.

Alongside his photography career, Mark composed music that was licensed in television productions across the US and UK. He paints. He writes. His ambition, long-held, is to create an immersive exhibition that brings his visual and audio worlds into the same room.

In 2023 he self-published his first book, Wolf Pack, a collection focused on his early years behind the lens. That was followed by limited-edition zines Happy Trail and Pulp intimate, carefully produced objects that reflect his belief that the physical form of a publication matters. His latest book in Jaime, which focuses on his time in Málaga, capturing the model and the city into one publication. His work has appeared in Yummy, DNA Magazine, NeoMen, Physique Pictorial, Blue, and Photo & Video Numérique, and has been shown in group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Madrid.

Now based in Sevilla, Spain, Mark's proximity to Europe has added new collaborators and new energy to his practice. His ongoing series Weightless, explorations of male dancers using subtle digital manipulation to warp perspective and geometry, shows a photographer who refuses to stop evolving.

Inspiró and the Architecture of an Independent Press

SNIFF doesn't exist in isolation. It is the second major publishing venture from The Male Muse Publishing, following Inspiró, a magazine Mark created to shine a light on the artists he finds inspiring, celebrating male beauty and sensuality across a range of artistic disciplines: photography, collage, ceramics, found objects, digital work, and drawing. The name itself signals the intention: from the Latin meaning "he inspired," "in spirit," and "breathe into."

Where Inspiró casts a wide, celebratory net across queer male aesthetics, SNIFF goes somewhere rawer and more specific. Together they form an independent press with a clear point of view, that erotic art is not peripheral to queer culture, but central to it, and that it deserves publications built with the same care and craft as any fine art journal.

Why This Matters

The launch of SNIFF arrives at a moment when queer spaces, online and in print, are increasingly subject to the pressures of content moderation, algorithmic suppression, and what the magazine itself calls respectability politics. Against that backdrop, a physical, uncompromising publication dedicated to the full spectrum of queer desire is more than a creative project. It is, as the editors put it, a movement.

And at the center of it, behind the cover lens, at the editorial helm, is Mark Alan: a photographer who spent decades finding his voice, and has now built a platform powerful enough to amplify others alongside his own.

SNIFF, Scent 1 is available now in print and digital formats at The Male Muse Store.