RATIO: Bram Van Stappen - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bram Van Stappen (Antwerp, 1981) is a photographer and teacher. Ratio is the first of his three books that are all based on the size, linen and design, which he applies himself. He specializes in black-and-white photography. Dominique Somers is an artist, photographer, curator and writer based in Brussels.

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A glance and a silent body, trapped in a common, but non-reciprocal situation.

-Michel Foucault, in: The Birth of the Clinic

The work Ratio consists of 117 images featuring the same number of naked men and women photographed from behind. Bram Van Stappen made the series as part of the exhibition Back, organised in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2021. Over a period of six weeks, the photographer 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. For 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?

Text by Dominique Somers