“William,” who said that isn’t really his name, was THE photographer for boys in Speedos starting maybe 18 years ago. He’s from Australia; he took tons of pics of boys in Speedos, board shorts, cycling gear and rowing outfits, along with plain ol’ headshots. He’s simply the patriarch of the beach-boys, swimmers-in-Speedos genre.
If only he would put his archive up, but he may be gun-shy. Practicing this “genre” can get uncomfortable for a photographer.
I think there were boys in Melbourne who raised hell about being photographed and plastered on the Internet, so he backed off for a while, sort of going underground, disseminating photos to fans in less-obvious and exclusive members-only channels. Even his Web site came down – “William’s Teen Boy Paradise” it was called. It’s been gone so long that it’s barely googleable. At the time, you checked it weekly, eager to find a new post that wasn’t there the previous week. Ancient history. He was still shooting in 2009 and probably later, but I haven’t seen anything from 2012 onward. And his watermark changed from “William” to “WM” and even sometimes no name at all.
There have been other photographers in the genre all over the world, like Allen, ANG, Camillo, Freddie, Q, Scott Stanford— who took the famous “grey speedo boy” pics.
Stanford also backed off after hell was raised about his photos appearing online on porn sites – he didn’t put them there, but hell was raised anyway. He was put on paid leave from his government job, even, and later reinstated.
Surfrat is either William or a newcomer – somebody write in and let the SeriousAboutSpeedos staff know.
Sinal is at it still.
Don H. is at it, too, feeding forth to us a library of Turbo suits and wrestling singlets and baseball uniforms. But William was just the daddy of it all, amassing so much work, so much quality, and a lot of it on film, far more labor-intensive than processing with our SD cards. I always think of him when I go photographing models (willing or not!) at the beach.
