"Mona Kuhn Mona Kuhn (born 1969 in São Paulo, Brazil) is a German-Brazilian contemporary photographer best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form and essence.
Mona Kuhn began taking photographs at age 12, when her parents gave her a Kodak camera for her birthday.[1] Kuhn has attributed her interest to her early formative years:
“I didn’t grow up with cousins and I didn’t grow up with grandparents … so I think I always had, since I was a child, a slight inner need to bond or to create a small family. I think that the people that I photograph, if I look at all my series, were all people that could have been my extended family. That’s how I treat them. And that’s the real little seed that maybe comes from infancy."[2]
She moved to the United States in 1992 to attend Ohio State University and then furthered her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, moving to San Francisco at the height of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.[3] Kuhn has noted that her artistic influences shift as she is always looking to what is next and eager to learn something new, but has said: "I learned the most by looking at Richard Diebenkorn's composition, Lucian Freud's relationship with models, Georgia O'Keeffe's subtleties and Lee Miller's courage."[4]
Kuhn chose the nude as the focus of her work because it represents a timeless canon and she was interested in the idea of the body as residence. Her early work focused on details of the body in black and white; she is quoted as saying:
"I was not yet comfortable photographing the full figure. As I became more comfortable and as I stepped back with the camera and started seeing more of the environment, I realized right away that color was very important … that color was all around and balancing color became very important for me, and it also became a source of inspiration. Every new series starts with me imagining a palette; and then I grow from there."[5]
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-04-22 05:02 pm (UTC)Mona Kuhn (born 1969 in São Paulo, Brazil) is a German-Brazilian contemporary photographer best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form and essence.
Mona Kuhn began taking photographs at age 12, when her parents gave her a Kodak camera for her birthday.[1] Kuhn has attributed her interest to her early formative years:
“I didn’t grow up with cousins and I didn’t grow up with grandparents … so I think I always had, since I was a child, a slight inner need to bond or to create a small family. I think that the people that I photograph, if I look at all my series, were all people that could have been my extended family. That’s how I treat them. And that’s the real little seed that maybe comes from infancy."[2]
She moved to the United States in 1992 to attend Ohio State University and then furthered her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, moving to San Francisco at the height of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.[3] Kuhn has noted that her artistic influences shift as she is always looking to what is next and eager to learn something new, but has said: "I learned the most by looking at Richard Diebenkorn's composition, Lucian Freud's relationship with models, Georgia O'Keeffe's subtleties and Lee Miller's courage."[4]
Kuhn chose the nude as the focus of her work because it represents a timeless canon and she was interested in the idea of the body as residence. Her early work focused on details of the body in black and white; she is quoted as saying:
"I was not yet comfortable photographing the full figure. As I became more comfortable and as I stepped back with the camera and started seeing more of the environment, I realized right away that color was very important … that color was all around and balancing color became very important for me, and it also became a source of inspiration. Every new series starts with me imagining a palette; and then I grow from there."[5]