As a young girl coming of age in 1980s Brazil, Mona Kuhn discovered the power of photography when she received a Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera for her 12th birthday. “Photography is a modern, fast-paced medium and in a way that is what I like because I have a very restless side to me – but at the same time it scares me,” Kuhn tells AnOther in advance of the April 6 publication of Mona Kuhn: Works (Thames & Hudson), her first retrospective monograph chronicling a quarter century of work, selections from which are now on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York.
.
Since she was a teenager, Kuhn had been drawn to figurative work, particularly that of painters including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. After meeting Braziian artist Mário Cravo Neto, who used figurative photography to investigate the Afro Brazilian heritage and mysticism in Bahia, Kuhn embarked on her first study of the human form.
.
“I always wanted to go against how fast-paced the medium is, and work with nudes as a way of stopping time,” Kuhn reveals. “I was interested in the nude because it wasn’t limited by fashion; it was open-ended. It was not an easy thing because nudes have been done a lot, maybe in ways I do not think are best. At the time I was in college, in the early 90s, Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts were iconic, but it was not how I wanted it to be.”
.
Read the Full Story at AnOther
.
