Naked people-chameleons in the ecological body art project "Bodyscapes"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Photo connoisseurs love Jean-Paul Bourdieu for his ability to work with color. Ordinary landscapes, thanks to the photographer, begin to play with all the colors of the rainbow. Bourdieu is best known for his art project "Bodyscapes" … The images of the wilderness of Africa, untouched by man, became the backdrop for all the works in the series. According to the author's idea, the painted bodies of nude models, like chameleons, merge with the general landscape or harmoniously complement it.

Jean-Paul Bourdieu never took the easy way when creating photographs. Ordinary landscape photographs seemed boring to him. Therefore, he began to make his additions to the landscape, painting the sands of the desert, bushes and stones with bright, conspicuous colors. For the same reason, all of his photographs were taken with a film camera and not one of them was subjected to further processing in graphic editors. This way of creating art photographs requires a lot of preparation and patience. Perhaps the biggest problems were associated with the shooting location: during the day, due to the heat in the desert, the paint did not lie well on the bodies of the models, so the photo sessions were short and took place mainly in the morning. But this choice was not accidental: endless desert spaces with a minimum of vegetation have always been a wonderful canvas on which, thanks to the artist's talent, Bourdieu created works of photography.

The photographer believes that the human body is the primary unit for measuring beauty in art, because it was admired even in ancient Rome and Greece. Nudity is as beautiful and natural as the unspoiled by civilization, remote corners of Africa, which have long conquered the photographer's heart with their desert landscapes, salt lakes, sands and dried grasses. The fate of such places has always worried Bourdieu. He decided to show with his works that nature and people can coexist harmoniously, complementing each other. Therefore, the basis of the photographs included in the “Bodyscapes” series is created by people who, like chameleons, change the color of their skin, adapting to the world around them. Sometimes they are invisible, inscribed in the landscape in such a way as to bring the landscape to the fore, and sometimes they become the center of attention thanks to the bright colors that contrast with the general background.

Jean-Paul Bourdieu lives in California and works at UC Berkeley as a professor of design, drawing and photography. He has a lot of creative ideas for photo shoots, and he also plans to write another book on photography. And his works from the series "Bodyscapes", meanwhile, have already won over fifteen prestigious awards, including the likes of Guggenheim and Graham.