Mentor and business partner of Pat Milo, Lyle Frisbee went to prison in 1957 for publishing male nudes before it was legalized. Though he only served a year’s time, in that time he contracted a fatal case of Leukemia from which he died in 1958. In that time his business partner (and some would say life partner) went to college to take photography courses, initially so that he could continue to print Lyles old works.
Frisbee discovered many models who we now think of as “Pat Milo” models such as Bert Bauman above and in the first pic below, or Roland Steiner below him.
Collector’s Realm has several galleries of his work including Sam Hunter and John Manning below.
He was extensively published under the name Lyle Frisbee or Lyle of Los Angeles in the physique magazines of the mid 1950s like “The Male Figure” below.
For such a short career, Frisbee took pictures of many different models, including quite a few nudes.
Lyle Frisby
1930-1958
When leukemia claimed the life of Lyle Frisby on 3 January 1958, one of the brightest stars of the physique photography field passed away.
Lyle was a devout Mormon and the ideals of his re-ligion were reflected in his everyday living. He left a suc-cessful career as a commercial photographer to enter the U. S. Army during the Korean Conflict and was sent to the European Theater instead of Korea, where he had hoped to serve. Upon release from the Army he resumed his career as a commercial photographer.
Despite every effort to halt the ravages of the heredi-tary disease which claimed his life, Lyle knew that he would soon die. He continued to work at both his commercial and physique photography. His work in the physique field is too well known to need recounting here. Fortunately, Falcon Studio was able to acquire his negatives and the results speak for themselves. We present here only a small part of this invaluable collection. Further selections will be pre-sented in future issues of Guild Press, Ltd. publications.
Unless otherwise noted, sets of models featured in this volume are available through Falcon Studio. An order blank is provided on page 70.
