For her fifth book with Steidl, Mona Kuhn has entered the heart of the American desert and returned with a sequence of pictures that is seductive, enigmatic and a little unsettling. Private proposes a world in which concrete reality and the imaginary are one. Plants and animals on the edge of survival, sun-drenched landscapes and wind-sculpted earth are intercut with a series of nudes that push Kuhn's renowned sensitivity to human form into unexpected directions. The result is a book somewhere between the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the cinema of Robert Altman and a lucid dream.
A separate reality; a place of sepia, endlessly erudite, that is, despite itself, a thirst: of the eye, the hand in its search for texture, and the spirit that does not always long for separateness, but wholeness through affinities; all of this is Mona’s Kuhn’s Private. (Christopher J Johnson
Photo-Eye Blog)
For a new monograph, Private, Kuhn’s fifth publication for Steidl, the photographer focused her gaze on the bleached tones and broad expanses of light that bathe the Mojave Desert, a few hours drive from her Los Angeles home. In a series of thoughtful and intimate compositions, Kuhn catalogs flora and fauna, most of it coarse-grained and engineered for survival. Landscapes are windswept and invite introspection. Hard light falls on no-nonsense structures that are built to last.
Punctuated throughout these pages are female nudes, bathed in the same supple light and shadow, their faces mostly serene. As in previous series by Kuhn, the artist employs glass as a secondary lens and means of filtration and dissolution of identity, shooting her subjects from outside of structures, allowing their features to soften and meld with the reflections of the surrounding terrain.
The sequencing of the images in Private is expertly tuned to tease out the complex relationship between the vulnerability of the nude female form and the rugged natural context which Kuhn employs as a backdrop. Kuhn’s models are mostly supine, the softness of their luminous skin a foil and a complement to the jagged, indomitable geology of the landscape in which they find themselves. Against this backdrop, the self is by turns magnified and diminished into a dreamy, sensual phenomenology. (Kevin Greenberg The Last Magazine)
Perhaps it was just an excuse to show you what is so exhilarating, and that is the desert in the dark – a mystery surrounded by black, and what you cannot see in the few feet ahead of you. That is what is appealing about your books. The images of the people which inhabit them are mysterious; the attending images of their rooms; the textures of the walls; the jungle foliage; the dry, desert landscapes... all those things to me are such a wonderful place to visit through the vision of someone you admire for what they see, unlike the direction I take in the way that I approach photography. (Paul Ruscha Issue Magazine)
The images reveal themselves through their subtleties, through tone, colour and clever image arrangements. The images are enigmatic and call for repeat viewing to unravel their subtle meaning. The desert is a space that has been photographed many times, but Kuhn reveals a more sensitive side that link it to mortality and the role of humans in this wild space. (Rory Duckhouse Photo Book Magazine)
Well known for her famous semi-saturated and rich depth-of-field nudes, this publication by Mona Kuhn takes the same set of photographic skills to the desert, which she captures with a similar perspective. Beautiful images of empty buildings, empty housing developments, arid landscapes and native flora and fauna are interspersed with her trademark clothing-free models, all within the same color palette, focus and context. (Andre Crump rangefinderonline.com)
Kuhn made the photographs in Private entirely on film with a Hasselblad, in part because of the unavailability of electricity while she was traversing the desert alone or with her subjects. To edit the work she would mount “little prints on a huge wall” in her workspace and look them over daily, taking out anything that started to bore her, lacked a certain depth or simply didn’t fit the evolving narrative. Through this sort of attrition she whittled two years’ worth of photographs down to the most compelling and cohesive set of images. “It’s a slow process, six to eight months, but that [process] is when the work will tell the artist what it wants to be,” Kuhn says. (Dzana Tsomondo pdnonline.com)
