The young male body is the fundamental theme of Alair Gomes’s photographic work. This emphasis is all the more striking given the repressive political and cultural context of Brazil in the 1960s and ’70s. So Eder Chiodotto has rendered a great service to admirers of the photographer, who was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1921 and died there in 1992, in curating “Young Male: Photographs by Alair Gomes,” the largest show of Gomes’s work ever presented by a commercial gallery.

Gomes studied engineering and the physical sciences, but from an early age he developed a fixation on the theme of the male