To celebrate Elizabeth Avedon’s Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, The Eye of Photography is republishing her best papers that appeared in these pages. This one, about photographer Mona Kuhn’s work Jungle Roots, is dated December 19, 2010
“Naked, Nude or Naturalist” was the theme around Mona Kuhn when I first met her several years ago. It was around that time Kuhn was nominated for the 2006 Prix Photographique BMW—ParisPhoto Award, just after her first photobook, Mona Kuhn: Photographs, was published by Steidl (2004) and just before her second Steidl monograph Evidence (2007) came on the scene.
Recognized as “one of the important new voices in contemporary photography” Kuhn’s large-scale color images had a dreamlike quality. Her impressionist styled nudes, seemed effortless, creating the effect of people naked, but comfortable in their own skins. I wanted to find out more about this young photographers’ point of view and how she arrived at creating these stirring images. I was intrigued by Mona’s background and her warm, inviting demeanor. Born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1969, of German descent, educated in the United States at Ohio State University, and was an independent studies scholar at the Getty Research Institute in L.A. She spent her summers in a French naturist colony and the subjects in her photographs were of friends she developed a trust with over the years there. In 2008, she returned to Brazil for the first time in twenty years. This portfolio of work, Native, is the result.
“My previous body of work (Photographs, Steidl 2004 and Evidence, Steidl 2007),” she says, “was all done in France through the summers in a naturist community—I wanted to photograph the nude, I wanted it to be an authentic experience and when I found out about this place I felt very comfortable and very, in a way, also protected and welcomed to a place where people were already in the nude. Even though I am very outgoing, I also have a shy side to me, and one of the things I don’t like is to ask someone to get naked because I’m not really interested in them being naked, I’m more interested in the body as a residence of who we are. I went from there to my home country in Brazil—I hadn’t been back for twenty years. I didn’t want to be in a naturist colony in Brazil. I wanted to photograph people; I wanted to find a thread to continue my language that I had started with the previous work . How to continue that, but in a different environment that would be challenging for me with a different kind of palette,a different view into the subject. I went to Brazil three times during 2008, each time for about two months. The first time was going into the forest photographing, re-analyzing what does Brazil mean to me, what does the temperature, the way people talk to each other, the street life, the sounds, the smells, the noise of the birds if you go into the forest—everything is just so overwhelming and it reminds you of so many experiences, some good, some bad. It’s this love-hate relationship of going back home.”
Elizabeth Avedon
Elizabeth Avedon is an independent curator, book and exhibition designer, and writer on photography.
