Bram Van Stappen - RATIO (I)

The work RATIO consists of 117 images featuring the same number of naked men and women photographed from behind. Over six weeks, Bram Van Stappen set up a field studio and invited visitors to undress and take place in front of the camera, yet face the opposite direction.

Set in a generic surrounding and central composition, evenly lit and tightly cropped, the resultant black-and-white images display a form of (anti)portraiture that seems above all to be a study in paradox. How do we read this collection of head and legless torsos that do not even face us? How can bodies this naked and exposed appear so walled off and private?

So unique and at the same time universal?

Leafing through the book, we are confronted with an accumulation of nude backs in different shapes and sizes: male and female, young and old, inked and blank, slender and plump, (a)symmetric, straight, or with hunched shoulders. The head, neck, pelvis, and lower extremities are cut from the image with surgical precision, leaving only the back of the torso, arms, and sometimes part of the hands in view. What remains are pieces of an unidentified body frame, covered by a layer of skin.

Bram Van Stappen's work questions the photographic medium in itself. He scans image element after image element, subject after subject, switches between abstraction and figuration, and focuses on the materiality of the subject or print. He searches for the uniqueness of an image or tries to arrive at an archetype through obsessive repetition. From medium format to cheap point-and-shoot cameras are employed to get a grip on the sometimes unreal everyday, to extract a comprehensible microcosm from a complex pool of impressions, atmospheres, people, places, and situations. All this with an often anomalous photographic frame and a disorienting point of view to reduce his motifs to their most abstract form in an endless search for the code of the aura of the image.

Editing and sequencing: Bram Van Stappen
Design: Bram Van Stappen
136 pages
15.6 x 122 cm
English
Text by: Dominique Somers
Publication date: September 2021
ISBN: 9789464363241