Mona Kuhn – Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. of German descent. Born 1969 (48 y/o) Now lives in Los Angeles.
She is admired globally for not only her photography, but as a curator and in the publishing world as an editor within the fashion industry.
I had not heard of her before starting this project, but having ‘Google Imaged’ her, I found somebody that was producing the sort of work that I have been searching in vain for, something that I have wanted to produce myself. The female form has fascinated and excited (non sexual) me for a long time, but I could never articulate or even picture in my own mind exactly what it is that I have wanted to produce. So when I saw her images, soft and sensual yet having more (lots more) to say than just, ‘look at this beautiful body’, I was immediately intrigued and inspired by the work that Kuhn has been producing to create something of my own. Like all good things, it is wonderfully simple but fantastically effective. My only regret is that I am now going to be following, when I wanted to be breaking new ground.
Her early nude work was largely black & white and also mostly only parts of the body. She explains that it has been a development process whereby initially she felt uncomfortable shooting full nude. Slowly though, she got used to it, and as she started to pan out to encompass the full body then she was able to see the bigger picture. At this point she realised that she had to introduce colour to her work.
I like to work in black & white and would like to try using Kuhn’s techniques but in black and white, maybe adding grain.
The secret to some of the beauty of her images is how she has spent a lot of time living with her subjects to help them to be at ease in her presence. This comes through very clearly. Her works are like a cocktail, when everything is mixed in exactly the right measures, you get something very special. Her familiarity with her subjects are the secret to the success she achieves. In some of her best work (to my mind) she uses a shallow depth of field. She uses it in a very clever way to create/accentuate tension between the personalities in the images. Her use of the shallow DoF also reduces the bodies (or parts of) to mere shapes, cleverly taking away the sexual and replacing it with the sensual. She is able to take naked body and a background/foreground, and create something of beauty on a single plain.
Since 1998, she has been an independent scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and to the best of my knowledge still is.
In December 2016 she saw fruition of her own idea to take the art gallery out to the public in a spectacular way. Forty five billboards across Los Angeles were filled with work from a selection of artists, using not just the medium of photography, but many other mediums.
See below for examples of Mona Kuhn’s work.
I see! 