Where the boys are: a New York City photo exhibition showcases photographers' visions of the "Boys of Summer". (photography).

Beaches and sweltering streets aren't the only places to find boys this summer--just visit Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood ClampArt gallery. Its "Boys of Summer: Photographs of and About Men" exhibition, beginning June 5, features stunning and potent photographic images of men snapped by a diverse roster of artists past and present, including Arthur Tress, Robert Mapplethorpe, George Platt Lynes, Miles Ladin, Nan Goldin, Mel Roberts, Jo Jo Whilden, and Duane Michals.

"The show was originally intended as a fun selection of portraits and photos of men," says openly gay curator Brian Paul Clamp, "but when you start putting together a group of images spanning the 20th century, they begin to take more of a political tack. You start noticing what a lot of these artists were struggling with throughout the course of the 20th century. Things like Bill Jacobson's work--that takes on more of a psychological aspect about maleness and what it means to depict men through art."

Culled from private collections and from the photographers themselves, "Boys of Summer" includes world-premiere photos from Tom Atwood, Paul Meleschnig, and Brian Finke. Finke, whose sun-kissed, stylized, homoerotic images of high school and college football players and cheerleaders will be collected into book form this year, is also one of the exhibition's two lone heterosexual contributors. That said, "he's very charismatic and soft-spoken, so I imagine a lot of these football players might mistake him for being gay anyway," Clamp notes.

The "Boys of Summer" exhibit runs through September 6. And what does Clamp have planned after the boys of summer have gone? Grinning, he says, "I'll start hanging out with the boys of fall."

Ferber has also written for Entertainment Weekly and Time Out New York.