This Israeli photographer’s work is all about ‘subverting masculinity’

A shot from “Stained,” photographer Nir Arieli’s latest project. Photo by Nir Arieli

By Stav Ziv September 20, 2025

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Before Nir Arieli started photographing dancers, his job was to take pictures of soldiers. These may seem like disparate tasks, but it was during Arieli’s mandatory military service that his future endeavors took root. He’s since built a body of work looking at male dancers — exploring questions about masculinity through images that quietly topple traditional notions and expand the range of visible possibilities.

He’s been rolling out his most recent project, “Stained,” on Instagram since May. It’s a striking series of photos shot in his old Brooklyn apartment over the course of three years, captured here and there amid the demands of a busy commercial career working most often with dance companies.

These unconventional portraits of male dancers show them embraced, limbs intertwined, or else locked in a struggle — maybe both. They exude strength and tenderness. They’re exposed and hidden. Powerful and graceful. Masculine and masculine. It’s the latest chapter in an ongoing artistic investigation that traces back to the soldiers Arieli photographed.

“That was the seed,” he told me over Zoom from his new home in New Jersey, where he recently moved with his husband. “Especially in a place like the military, where masculinity is such a huge emphasis, and a certain kind of masculinity,” he said, “and especially with combat soldiers and units that I’ve seen, there’s a lot of pressure to be a man, to put on a facade of this unbreakable persona.”

His role as a photographer for the IDF’s weekly magazine Bamahane, which ceased publication in 2016, took him to the desert, the mountains and the sea, embedding with all kinds of units, sometimes for days at a time. He fought stubbornly for this assignment, which wasn’t the position the IDF had wanted him in. Eight months into his mandatory three-year service, he won.

But many others he encountered on his army photography assignments couldn’t say the same about where they’d ended up. “I remember specifically seeing these people who I felt like they were like zombies. They were put in a place that was not right for them,” he said. “They didn’t use their talents, their skills. And they were just wilting.”

Arieli has always been interested in people, and this work gave him an opportunity to look closely. “I saw these young men, like adult teenagers, that are put with a gun in their hands and being told, like, go be a fighter,” Arieli said — whether they wanted to or not. He observed them both in and out of character. Underneath the surface, he glimpsed “gentle souls,” he said. “I started photographing it then,” pointing his lens at these young men when their macho masks slipped.

One photo from the 2006 Lebanon War catches a young soldier after a night of bombing. “The whole earth was shaking, dirt going everywhere,” said Arieli, who’d stayed with the unit in the north of Israel, ensconced in a sleeping bag not far from the bombing machines. In daylight, the soldier — still curled up in his makeshift bed, eyes closed, brow furrowed — reaches one hand up to tinker with his ear protection, fixing what look like headphones, performing for no one.

“It was such a vulnerable moment,” Arieli said. “Towards the end of my service, I started to look for those moments, the in-between moments, I call them, where they’re off guard.” He saw sensitivity, kindness and intelligence. He saw men who didn’t fit one stereotype of manliness.

“I think what happened with the dancers later on is that I realized that they’re sort of the perfect example of that subverted masculinity,” he said. “It was a natural progression to what I was doing before.”

Finding photography, discovering dance

Growing up about halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in a small town called Maccabim, now part of Modi’in, Arieli had an inexplicable notion from a young age that he wanted to be an artist. Part of it, maybe, was that he felt he was different from his male peers.

“Something about art felt comforting and right and correct for me, like a safe place for me to be in,” he said. “But I didn’t know what I was good at, so I spent my teenage years trying a lot of different art forms and basically failing miserably in each one of them.” He tried graphic design, filmmaking, theater, painting and sculpture. Nothing was quite right until he picked up a camera.

He took an art track in high school with an emphasis on photography, trying his hand at everything from landscape to still life and learning to print in the dark room. He kept coming back to people, and for his senior project, he made a series of portraits of his immediate family.

Then, later, after his formative experience as a military photographer, another family member opened his eyes to dance.

Arieli had leveraged his considerable portfolio from his military service into a scholarship at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. “In Israel, you show these pictures to people, and they’re like, yeah, okay, we’ve all been there,” he said. “But abroad, it looked really impressive.”

When he arrived in the U.S., the only familiar face was that of a second cousin he’d met just a handful of times: Tal Adler Arieli had enrolled the previous year in the dance program at Juilliard. “He was very gracious,” said Arieli of his cousin, who showed him around the city and introduced him to people. When Arieli needed models for school projects, his cousin’s dancer friends volunteered.

“So I was photographing Tal, I was photographing all of his friends, and in my spare time, I was coming to see their shows. Juilliard was an amazing place to be educated about dance,” said Arieli, who’d previously had no exposure to the artform. “I was like a little child, seeing this for the first time and being blown away.”

He was “wowed” by the dance, but even more so by the dancers. He was fascinated by people who could move their bodies in incredible, almost alien ways. He wanted to know who they were, what their lives were like and what sacrifices they had to make to dedicate themselves to such a demanding art form. “A lot of the work that I’m making is not about dance,” he said. “It’s about dancers.”

And this curiosity very quickly brought him back to the questions he’d started asking when his lens was trained on soldiers.

Building a body of work 

Every scar, freckle, blemish, and stretch mark is visible in “Inframen.” The series uses infrared and ultraviolet processing to magnify imperfections on the otherwise statuesque bodies of male dancers. “That was my way to get under the dancers’ skin,” Arieli said. He wanted to highlight the tension between “the strength of the body and the fragility of the soul.”

As a student, Arieli was often told his work was “pretty,” and that he was destined to be a commercial photographer. Neither was a compliment in art school. “So when I graduated and I was offered an exhibition, it shook my world,” he said. “I was just doing the work that I felt passionate about, and someone liked it enough to put it on the wall in Chelsea. I remember that night, I couldn’t sleep. It was like, oh my god, maybe I am an artist.”

“Inframen” opened at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in 2014, followed by “Flocks” in 2016. The latter, which captured dance companies as intricate piles of inert bodies, is the only series among more than half a dozen personal projects that included women.

For the most part, Arieli has continued to ask the questions that took root when he was surrounded by soldiers, looking past reductive archetypes and searching for diverse expressions of masculinity. “Flower He Is,” for example, portrayed young male dancers donning intricate floral headpieces, a metaphor for athletes in full bloom, at the peak of their abilities, before their youthful bodies begin to age and betray them. “Korban” — “victim” or “sacrificial offering” in Hebrew — paired male dancers of all ages in scenes of grief, suffering and distress.

Ori Flomin, a dancer and choreographer who posed for “Korban,” remembers they spent about an hour on the outdoor shoot. Arieli deftly and succinctly conveyed what he was looking for, Flomin said, and then allowed the dancers to heed their own creative instincts. Once his models arrive at the right tableau, Arieli typically directs them to refine details like the angle of the head or the placement of an arm. “He’s allowing people to be vulnerable,” Flomin said. “To be more feminine or more masculine, or more who they are.”

“Korban” never showed in a gallery, and Arieli pivoted toward his commercial work, which was gathering momentum. Over the years, he’s taken on prestigious dance institutions including Alvin Ailey and its school, American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Juilliard, and worked with corporate clients, conferences and nonprofits like Volunteers of America.

“But I didn’t want to let go of making things that I’m passionate and curious about,” he said. “So I kept on making projects, but in very slow intervals.” For now, he’s been sharing his personal work on social media, but he hopes to find his way back to a gallery.

“What I want to give to the world is a body of work about male dancers, and this is what I’m building,” he said. “Every project is like a chapter.”

The most recent entry in that oeuvre of visual research is “Stained,” which Arieli compared in philosophy to contemporary dance. “Classical dance is very rigid,” he said. “You get rewarded for being within the rules and [excelling] in the structure, in the frame. And contemporary dance is about breaking the rules.”

So are these portraits. The subjects’ faces are often obscured, or their eyes closed. Their bodies are mostly bare, and just one hand is painted, stained from wrist bone to fingertips in black, gray or pink. The dancers sometimes appear in duos, and it’s not always clear whose limbs are whose. They’re flexing their muscles, but also embracing and supporting one another.

“There’s playfulness in the idea of what a man is,” said Ori Manor, a recent Juilliard grad and Batsheva Ensemble dancer who posed for “Stained.” He was particularly moved by a recurring motif in the images: a man being carried or held. “There’s no answer to what masculinity is,” he said. “You can tell by the pictures, there’s so many different kinds.”

Instagram removed one of Arieli’s “Stained” images, despite the fact that both men were clearly wearing dance belts, the typical undergarments of a male dancer. Arieli was taken aback. He’s never been interested in nude photography, he explained, and his images aren’t meant to be erotic. “It’s definitely about intimacy. It’s not about sexual performance of any kind,” he said. “This is the first time my work got censored.”

He chalks it up to the error of an algorithm. Probably.

But, he admitted, “we still live in a conservative society, and many people are uncomfortable with the really simple idea that I’m trying to present here: that masculinity does have many shades, and that gentle masculinity is beautiful and should be encouraged from a young age.”

“We should all be able to look at it and appreciate it,” he said. “And as long as I have the opportunity, I will show it.”