Mona Kuhn Bücher

„Seeking the innermost self in her photographs, Kuhn achieves a mood of intimacy by photographing up close models she knows well. Her photographs are a product of lasting relationships built on mutual affection. In a sense, the images are based on the memory of shared experiences.“ Julie Nelson The people in Mona Kuhn’s photographs are nude but not naked. Completely relaxed before the camera, they give the impression that nothing could clothe them better than their own skin. With a unique style, Kuhn’s intimate photographs of both young and old are sensual compositions of skin and wrinkles, light and shadow, gestures and gazes. She creates taughtly composed images which balance sharply rendered portraits against blurred backgrounds to lure the eye and provoke the imagination.

This career retrospective showcases the work of Mona Kuhn, a prominent contemporary photographer known for her striking and intimate portrayals of the human form. The collection highlights her unique approach to photography, blending classical influences with a modern sensibility. Through a selection of her most significant pieces, the book offers insights into her creative process and artistic evolution, inviting readers to explore the themes of vulnerability and connection that permeate her work.

"This work started as a personal journey. Metaphorically, I was thinking of a bird that flies back into the forest, searching for its childhood nest. The images here are a creation of my abstracted wishes and dreams. As I was searching, instead of home, I found an empty past, just traces of it. Yet, my journey was filled with new friendships and discoveries made along the way," writes Los Angeles-based photographer Mona Kuhn about her journey back to her native Brazil after 20 years. Her third photobook, Native unfolds slowly, as a dreamy narration of this adult exploration of her childhood home. Photographed in the rainforest and surrounding city area, the images are suffused with a deep green, gold and pink palette. Native is accompanied by an essay from critic Shelley Rice.

The people in Mona Kuhns photographs are nude but not naked. Completely relaxed before the camera, they give the impression that nothing could clothe them better than their own skin. With a unique style, Kuhns intimate photographs of both young and old are sensual compositions of skin and wrinkles, light and shadow, gestures and gazes. She creates taughtly composed images which balance sharply rendered portraits against blurred backgrounds to lure the eye and provoke the imagination. A Los Angeles-based artist of German-Brazilian ancestry, Kuhn photographs in naturist communities in France. The models are her friends, and the resulting photographs reveal a comfortable and graceful intimacy between the artist and her subjects. Containing luscious young bodies that suggest the meditative repose of classical statuary, the mood is languorous, projecting an almost Edenic eroticism that is neither sexy nor exploitative.

Exploring the intersection of architecture and memory, this work delves into the Schindler House, a 1922 creation by Rudolph M. Schindler that served as a cultural hub. Mona Kuhn's collaboration with UC Santa Barbara's art history department allowed her access to Schindler's archives, leading to the reproduction of rare blueprints and letters. Through her surreal solarized photographs, she presents an ethereal female figure, blurring the lines between presence and absence, while challenging the essence of photography as a medium of record.

"Acclaimed for her contemporary and intimate depictions of the nude, Kuhn takes a new direction into abstraction in her latest series She Disappeared into Complete Silence. Photographed at a golden modernist structure [Acido Dorado, designed by architect Robert Stone] on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, architectural lines, light reflections and a single figure have been carefully balanced against the backdrop of the Californian desert. The human figure, Mona's friend and collaborator Jacintha, emerges like a surrealist mirage, fragmented and indistinct, at times submerged in shadows or overexposed. The building's facade of glass and mirrors serve as optical planes, an extension of the artist's camera and lens. Light is split into refracting colors, desert vegetation grows sideways, inside is outside and outside in. Kuhn pushes a certain disorienting effect by introducing metallic foils as an additional surface, at times producing purely abstract results. She Disappeared into Complete Silence marks Kuhn's increasing use of techniques that appear to merge the figure, abstractions and landscape into one"--Publisher's website

For her fifth book with Steidl, Mona Kuhn has entered the heart of the American desert and returned with a sequence of pictures that is seductive, enigmatic and a little unsettling. Private proposes a world in which concrete reality and the imaginary are one. Plants and animals on the edge of survival, sun-drenched landscapes and wind-sculpted earth are intercut with a series of nudes that push Kuhn’s renowned sensitivity to human form into unexpected directions. The result is a book somewhere between the poetry of TS Eliot, the cinema of Robert Altman, and a lucid dream.

In a remote landscape near Bordeaux, Mona Kuhn owns a little house: simple, bare and even without electricity. Kuhn travels here each year to entertain family and friends as they drop by. Bordeaux Series contains portraits of these people dear to Kuhn made over the last four years, as well as landscape photographs. Kuhn photographs her subjects in the same room with a red fabric backdrop and a chair, so that the nudity of each sitter is the only indication of his or her idiosyncrasies. A sequel to Kuhn’s Native (2009), Bordeaux Series is a sensual exploration of the contemporary nude. Mona Kuhn was born in Brazil in 1969, is of German descent and now lives in Los Angeles. She received her BA from Ohio State University before studying at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996 and at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 1999. Steidl has published Kuhn’s Photographs (2004), Evidence (2007) and Native (2009).