• Nude and Technique – Claus Rose

    Date posted: November 14, 2006 Author: jolanta
    Photography as a way of living, with all its opportunities for expression, became my passion at an early stage. In particular, the magic of nude photography, which often lends the model an even greater aura of beauty and grace, is a great fascination for me. My models are my first and most important audience in what I do. I try to emphasize their individual charisma with specific erotic symbolism, and to approach the variety of their personalities with creative versatility. A focus of my photography is the portrait, partly with clothed, partly with unclothed bodies. A nude portrait is the natural consequence of nude painting in an artist’s studio.
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    Claus Rose.

    Photography as a way of living, with all its opportunities for expression, became my passion at an early stage. In particular, the magic of nude photography, which often lends the model an even greater aura of beauty and grace, is a great fascination for me. My models are my first and most important audience in what I do. I try to emphasize their individual charisma with specific erotic symbolism, and to approach the variety of their personalities with creative versatility. A focus of my photography is the portrait, partly with clothed, partly with unclothed bodies. A nude portrait is the natural consequence of nude painting in an artist’s studio.     Yet, modern nude photography is far away from being obliged only to the conventions of classical ideals and academic gestures. Currently, the art form is gaining more and more courage to make experiments with genuine representations in various, imaginable sceneries of everyday modern life.

    One of my permanent projects on location has the title “Nude and Technique.” Its aim is visually to combine a person as an individual or as a human body with technology. You may think at first, from a formal-aesthetic view, of the presentation of contrasts between scenery and model. For example, the contrast of hard and soft or old and young. Morbid houses, crumbling walls, fissures or fractured glasses can point to decline and be opposed to the perfect face or body in the prime of youth. The decadence of the material will be projected, from a spectator’s view, to the decadence of the human being. Thus, a reference to the model arises not only in form but also in the content to its environment.

    It is this aspect that I consider, besides the photo-technical elements, as important for the quality of the photo as anything else. A formal reference also arises, besides the already mentioned sorts of contrasts, by the contradictions of tall and small, robust and graceful, light and dark or forms, areas, lines and colors.     Analogically, harmonies bring together model and scenery where forms and lines that result in the anatomy and posture of the model repeat themselves within that scenery. The only aim of the project “Nude and Technique” is to unite man and machine into a formal entity, combining the best of both of them.

    Especially in connection with technique, the well-known pieces of master photographer Günter Blum (1949-1997) play a pivotal role in the production of art photography. He changed visions into photo worlds full of sensuality and expressive body language and has, up to now, been copied often but seldom matched. His expensively erected scenery reminds of the times of silent movies.     His models appear like bold and cold amazons of industrial society, strong, self-conscious, challenging. Blum represents the ideal in the range of erotic phantasms with technical accessories. In order to appeal to the spectator’s fantasy, it is not necessary to have great visions and self-made stages. It is decisively to keep the eyes open for all possible sceneries and requisites. It is also decisive to share time for being embraced by local facilities until ideas of pictures are ripening in one’s own fantasy. Besides large halls of machinery, the details also inspire me as well as industrial equipment or discarded pieces of metal.

    In combination with technique, photographing people attempts additionally to find philosophical views of our existence. Up until Plato, technique was understood as a capability of how to handle a thing. From renaissance onwards, technique and technology took over more and more functions for the man. Industrialisation commenced a process of transition from handicraft to factory work, which relied on machines directly. Frederick Taylor, a scientist of labor (1856-1915), even considered a man to be a kind of machine. He developed a method to increase production by precise instructions, high division of labor and material stimulations. But, monotony at assembly lines resulted in a declining interest of workers for enterprise and production as well as in defects of quality and in a high number of sick workers. After an epoch of humanisation by co-determination and teamwork, sociologists now in the era of globalisation and deeper orientation in capital markets speak of “ReTaylorisation.”

    If cheaper production and cuts in work conditions are accepted in the face of unemployment, it is a task of art to broach the issue of the wide field of sentiments and sorrows, but also of perspectives and visions. How will a man, being symbolized by his fragile body, react towards the predominant apparatus? Will man—in his bodily function—change to gadget? The project “Nude and Technique” opens, besides the fascinating demonstration of harmonies and contrasts, a wide field to express the dominance and dependence of mankind on technique.

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