Chris Nelson

Who was Chris Nelson?

Edmund Chris Nelson was an American photographer and co-founder of Bear Magazine in the 1980s, was the photographic pioneer in the gay-oriented erotic photography of mature men with hairy bodies and facial hair. His work directly led to the legitimizing of the bear community as a social group.

By profession, Nelson was a photomicroscopy researcher at the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley Labs. He was considered a highly adept microscopist at the Lab, with one colleague there noting, "Chris was the backbone of NCEM, the kind of person that makes LBL great. He was an awesome microscopist who understood advanced electron microscopes like a test pilot understands a jet plane." Many international researchers appreciated Nelson's eye for detail and often requested to work with him given his reputation and skill level.

Together with his then partner, magazine publisher Richard Bulger, Nelson developed a characteristic "look", first in black-and-white portraits of men in San Francisco's biker and leather community, and then, as the bear community grew, in black-and-white erotic portraits of a great number of men who submitted themselves to the magazine as amateur models.