The Salon Mont d’Or Photos presents Nudes & Portraits, an exhibition by Patrick Vollat.
Nus et portraits are major genres of painting, sculpture, and photography; since antiquity for the first two indeed earlier, since motifs of this kind already appear in prehistoric times on the walls of inhabited caves.
The reason is simple: they are both reflections and revelations of body and soul, which of course has always questioned humankind.
Nudity is both revelation and representation of intimacy and beauty. The only moments when human beings appear nude, in our modern civilizations at least, are indeed of the most intimate kind (washing, sex). Moreover, nude bodies represented in artistic iconography are generally of great beauty—idealized, magnified, and almost symbolic in nature.
Why female bodies?
It has so little to do with sexual attraction! Thus, once women were finally allowed by the (male) artistic establishment to practice the arts openly around the middle of the 19th century (with a few very rare earlier exceptions) they too depicted essentially female nudes rather than male ones.
The male nude most often shows (again, with very rare exceptions), under the pretext of virility (poorly understood), men who appear vindictive or even aggressive warriors or gymnasts preparing for combat (see Roman classical statuary) thus giving off an aura of violence and bestiality that we could gladly do without in these troubled times.
The female artistic nude, by contrast, is most often nothing but grace, delicacy, and poetry, inducing feelings of softness, love, and compassion, and proving far more soothing and calming.
And it is precisely this last representation that one can disrupt and use in reverse to develop and give force to the ideas and feelings one wishes to include in one’s images, as I explain in the following paragraph.
A most perilous exercise, nude photography requires avoiding the twin pitfalls of vulgarity and naivety while retaining its powers of fascination and sensuality. The nude challenges, shakes up, disturbs—sometimes even shocks—and thus amplifies the intentions and aims at work: those of the photographer as well as those of the model, and the reactions and emotions of those who contemplate the images. Lowering their guard in this way, viewers become far more permeable and receptive to the various messages, feelings, and ideas the photographer wished to convey (a most skillful stratagem!).
For some time now, I have juxtaposed within the same image first a clothed woman and a nude woman, then more recently the same woman clothed and nude. It became clear that this assemblage—attempting to combine portrait and nude photography, hoping to obtain more than either offers separately strongly provoked and questioned the viewer, perhaps ultimately revealing more powerfully the nakedness of the soul.
So let us praise Sandrah, a wonderful model with whom I have been working for five years now (Instagram: @sandrahphoto – website: www.sandrah.book.fr). Her simple, intense beauty; her presence, as moving as it is radiant; her intelligence and inventiveness, serve as the most unfailing revealer and driving force for translating ideas and atmospheres with the greatest possible power. To know and always remember: the difficulty of being.
Patrick Vollat
Patrick Vollat : Nus & Portraits
Salon Mont d’Or Photos
The salon takes place on Friday, March 6th from 2pm to 6pm and on Saturday and Sunday, March 7th and 8th from 10am to 6pm
Centre Laurent Bonnevay
23 rue du Castellard
69370 Saint-Didier-au-Mont-d’Or
https://salonmontsdorphotos.wixsite.com/2026
http://www.vollat.fr
[email protected]
https://www.instagram.com/vollat.photo
@vollat.photo
