RATIO
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. 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? 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. – Dominique Somers
inkjet 50 cm x variable
Hardback, 132 pages, 22 x 16.5 cm https://www.hopperandfuchs.com/shop/bram-van-stappen-ratio-242#attr=