Ashley Markle

The Lion and The Lamb

Essay by Gem Fletcher

In The Lion and the Lamb, Ashley Markle reframes wrestling as a nuanced art form where the search for safe havens, male community and psychological safety reveals the subtle evolution of ‘bro culture’ in competitive sports. By capturing the young men in Columbia University’s wrestling ring, Markle aligns herself with a lineage of artists who, as Gem Fletcher writes, challenge the perception of masculinity as fixed and immutable.

Gem Fletcher | Essay | 09 Oct 2024

In The Lion and The Lamb, New York photographer Ashley Markle posits how the arena of sports, particularly the locker room, once heralded as the pinnacle of toxic masculinity, is reconfiguring itself as a site of homosociality. The work follows Columbia University’s wrestling team and charts a brotherhood where masculinity is not a monolith but a complex array of nuanced traits. Strength and competition exist alongside intimacy and innocence as she presents a group of young men seeking kinship through sport.

While the work doesn’t dismiss the male instinct to battle, there’s an ordinariness to what Markle captures. Her wrestlers rarely perform for the camera or attempt to uphold the archetype of athleticism – power, dominance, ruthlessly competitive, etc. – instead, their demeanour is open and relatable, a sharp contrast to the prevailing discourse around toxic masculinity and young men.

At odds with the typical heroic visual lexicon of athletes, Markle’s storytelling thrives on her impulse to centre relational incongruities. She doesn’t chase a decisive moment. Instead, the success of her explorations rests on a continuum of frames juxtaposed to disrupt and reflect our preconceptions back to us while simultaneously reaching for the ineffable.

Markle admits she was “nervous” when making the project, unsure how the team would receive her artistic intentions. “Wrestlers are really in tune with their emotions,” Markle said about her experience with the team over the last two years. “It’s such a mental sport, and this group truly supports each other.”

Markle is not the only female photographer who has been apprehensive about entering the domain of the young male athlete. “These are the people us Queers feared in high school,” Catherine Opie has remarked about the young male athletes she photographed for High School Football (2007-09). In Opie’s portraits, we see young men like Devin, Robby, and Rusty who cannot quite embody the athletic prowess of their heroes emblazoned on the pages of GQ and ESPN magazines. Instead, their protective armature is ill-fitting, and their crotch grabs are too self-aware. In Markle’s images, the wrestlers seemingly resist performing, unlike Opie’s football players, who unsteadily attempt to live up to the archetype of athleticism, but their naivety prevails.

At the same time as Opie was exploring the landscape of football, Collier Schorr also began photographing high school wrestlers in New Jersey captivated by the friction between the sport’s macho aggression and its graceful choreography. While Opie’s work is steeped in context and reflected a sense of fragility as the young men traverse the precarious moment between youth and adulthood, Schorr’s wrestlers are untethered from their environment, drawing our attention to the potential of the corporeal both as totems of strength and seduction. There is a distinct awe of the masculine physique as warm-ups and grapples become homoerotic gestures. If Opie’s mission was to better understand young men in the early 2000s, Schorr’s impulse was imagining what it might be like to be one.

During this period, ‘bro culture’ marked a critical moment in shaping the imaginations of young men in the West. Sex comedies like American Pie, reckless prank shows such as Jackass, and the aggressive chaos stoked by nu-metal bands like Slipknot and Limp Bizkit dominated popular culture. At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg made Facemash, a precursor to Facebook, where he invited male students at Harvard to rate the attractiveness of their female classmates. The decade was defined by the popularity of transgressive rule-breaking by young men, bolstered by a pack mentality where chugging beer, casual misogyny, destruction and dominance ruled. Bro Culture was so pervasive – self-branded as counter-culture, a subversive attempt to go against the status quo – it went under interrogation, seen as a cultural moment rather than endemic of toxic masculinity.

In retrospect, bro culture now feels like the tame precursor to today’s “manosphere,” the internet ecosystem that combines self-improvement advice for young men with casual and sometimes violent misogyny. Rooted in incel communities and led by alpha male influencers [Andrew Tate, Kanye West, Joe Rogen and so on], this rising ideology centres on male supremacy and aggressive anti-feminist rhetoric that attracts young males in search of meaning, community and power. Embodying Michael Kimmel’s idea of aggrieved entitlement – a term he coined to describe how, over the last thirty years, the world has decentred young white men ­ – the manosphere was born online with offline consequences. Responding to the rise of equal rights, incels uphold a form of masculinity that is contingent on the oppression of others.

While at one end of the spectrum, the appetite for extremism continues to rise amongst young men, there is another cohort in search of safe havens, something made apparent to Markle while making The Lion and The Lamb. “I tried to photograph the boys outside the wrestling rooms, but I quickly realised it was key,” she comments. “These rooms were incubators for the boys to form bonds and communicate freely. As soon as they stepped out of them, they entered the real world full of judgments and narrow views of masculinity.” Markle’s project points to the significance of place in the context of masculinity while also describing the subtle evolution of competitive sports, once deemed responsible for upholding toxic traits, has now shifted in some cases to embody genuine male community and psychological safety.

It’s hard to resist Markle’s low-key optimism right now. Through her super-saturated and keenly observant pictures, she sits within a lineage of artists intent on debunking the idea that masculinity is fixed and immutable. Like Opie and Schorr before her, Markle illuminates the precociousness of her wrestlers’ inner lives as they attempt to navigate the dominant social structures that hold ideas about masculinity in place. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Ashley Markle

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Gem Fletcher is a writer, consultant and podcaster. Her work has been published in Foam, Aperture, Dazed, Creative Review and The British Journal of Photography. She also hosts The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the future of visual culture and what it means to be a photographer today.

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