Carmen Winant, Juergen Teller, Mona Kuhn, Paul Kooiker, ANNUAL SERIES No. 7 – Body Index, The Nipple, Study, Business of Fashion, 2020

Each year TBW Books curates four individual books by four artists who are deemed to be pursuing compelling work within the field of photography. For the seventh edition of the TBW Annual Series, four artists have been invited to approach the concept of the human form. Implementing stylistically distinct approaches, each book works to challenge the artist’s practice, making room for discovery not only within their own work, but also within the language of photography itself. While each book is conceived as a stand-alone title, an undeniable dialogue is shared between all four books when presented together, allowing the viewer to experience the collection as a singular photographic meditation.

Body Index started ten years ago when Carmen Winant worked as a model for drawing classes and, as she explains, watched herself be seen from all angles. Affected by this moment when the monitored female body is transformed into Art, Winant began collecting and pasting images of women posing – initially intended to be reference anatomical photographs for artists – to explore how the female body is instrumentalised in front of the eye of the camera. By recontextualizing these images, Winant locates and exposes a hidden rebellion within the posing bodies. Although originally appearing as pristine learning instruments, Winant’s subjects reveal self-control, an advantage, something wandering. A range of other bodies appear on top of these images – from lesbian separatists to physical therapists and beyond – merging into a single image plane that complicates the terms gendered bodies and stillness. Originally assembled as a modular piece separated into discrete panels containing hundreds of images, the images here are presented in a carefully curated selection, each figure contained on a single page.

In The Nipple the viewer is immediately confronted by the book’s cover of Juergen Teller’s mask-wearing nude subject. The image, notably shot pre-pandemic, acts as an allusion to the ever precarious nature of our mortal bodies. In his iconically casual style, Teller continues to allude to the body by pointing us to unused and uncared for exercise equipment on empty European city streets. Eventually this repetition is punctuated by a personal element, the artist himself undergoing an endoscopic medical procedure, perhaps routine but possibly more serious. When not isolating the human body itself, he gives us devastated proxies for it: an unworn dinosaur costume inert and wrinkled on the floor, a desiccated frog that’s fallen victim to roadkill, a lifeless fish on dirty ground many days since its last gasp. By contrasting images of weakness and desolation with those of bodily vitality, Teller foreshadows brilliantly the isolation and tension that, at the time of printing, were still yet to come.

For Study, Mona Kuhn returns to the darkroom for the very reason she fell in love with photography: the latent image. Inspired by the surrealist photographers of the 1920’s, she explores the ethereal quality of solarization. A visually distinct process through which the photographed subject seems underlined by the alchemist’s pencil, solarization is thought to be discovered by Lee Miller while printing for Man Ray, who ultimately took credit for the discovery. The method is as complex and uncertain as the human form itself; consequently the recipes from the past no longer work on present-day materials. Like the figure in her images, Kuhn sought to find her own balance, the results culminating in a series of unique prints that reveal layers of silver glow in the form of oxidized magic.

Business of Fashion was created in 2018 when photographer Paul Kooiker was invited by Michéle Lamy to do an art performance during Voices, an annual invitation-only event organized by the Business of Fashion (BOF) that gathers some of the most influential tastemakers of the global fashion industry, uniting them with innovators and entrepreneurs who together hold great influence on popular culture. Kooiker’s response to Lamy’s request was to photograph the guests one by one, equalizing them by capturing each from the neck down in a uniform “limbs-splayed” pose. Shot against a blank grayscale backdrop, the subjects, often accustomed to public recognition, become semi-anonymous, headless mannequins reminiscent of the window displays, mail order catalogues, and online marketplaces that drive the industry forward. Balancing a voyeuristic intrigue with tongue-in-cheek humor, the photographs reveal to the viewer the often banal clothing of those who are anything but.Each year TBW Books curates four individual books by four artists who are deemed to be pursuing compelling work within the field of photography. For the seventh edition of the TBW Annual Series, four artists have been invited to approach the concept of the human form. Implementing stylistically distinct approaches, each book works to challenge the artist’s practice, making room for discovery not only within their own work, but also within the language of photography itself. While each book is conceived as a stand-alone title, an undeniable dialogue is shared between all four books when presented together, allowing the viewer to experience the collection as a singular photographic meditation.