RATIO: Bram Van Stappen - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 946436324X ISBN 13: 9789464363241

Publisher: HOPPER&FUCHS, 2025

Synopsis

• A unique way to look at portrait photography
• Topography of backs
• Printed in black-and-white and duotone
• A photobook printed on Munken Print White 1.8 which gives the book a tactile experience
• Bram Van Stappen is a technical and conceptual photographer.

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 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.
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.

About this title

About the Author

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 specialised in black-and-white photography.

Dominique Somers is an artist, photographer, curator and writer based in Brussels.

From the Back Cover

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

Edition details

• Publisher: HOPPER&FUCHS
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 946436324X
• ISBN 13: 9789464363241
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 136