“This is me out of shape,” fireman Taylor Murphy told The New York Times last week, as he preened and worked his muscles for the photographer. Murphy was standing topless, applying swathes of cocoa butter to his 6-foot-5, 265-pound frame, in front of an enormous turn-of-the-century steel rotary converter.
Nearby, Alan Batt, who was photographing Murphy for a charity calendar featuring hunky New York City firefighters, adjusted his tripod. “I knew this guy was built like, ‘rrruhhhr!’ ," Batt said, grunting and making a “this big” gesture with his hands. “So I wanted him in a place that was rrruhhhr, you know?”
Batt said that the calendar was raising money for the Regional Burn Center at the Staten Island University Hospital.
Murphy, wrote the Times, did not seem fazed by his odd surroundings. Grand Central is a regular subject for fashion and film shoots, but not many take the treck below ground to frozen in time world of the rotary converter.
The son of a former deputy fire chief who was badly injured on September 11, he has been in the Fire Department for two years, but his modeling career stretches further back, with gigs at Diesel and the designer underwear line of the former tennis great Bjorn Borg.
The calendar, with Murphy’s photo, will be available in March. You can pick one up in Times Square, where they sell like hotcakes. Rrrruhhr!
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