Eric Kellerman

Eric Kellerman is a Briton who has lived near Nijmegen in the Netherlands for just over half his life. When not taking photographs, he teaches linguistics at the local university. In 2008, he will retire from academic life to spend more time on photography. He works almost entirely in the studio and uses digital equipment from camera to print, although image manipulation is limited to darkroom-like processes. Specialising in the nude, he has a regular team of female collaborators, most of whom have a serious interest in movement (dance, drama therapy, athletics, martial arts). Sometimes, when there is no model available, he photographs vegetables and fruit out of desperation.

Kellerman considers his work to be distant, abstract, melancholic, ‘unerotic’, despite its subject matter. He emphasises line, geometrical form, texture, implicit movement, and above all, chiaroscuro. He likes to create ambiguity in his photos, so that the viewer is sometimes unsure what part of the body is being looked at. In this way, he attempts to free the female body of its conventional associations.

He has been influenced by surrealism (Dali, Magritte, Delvaux’ nudes and railway stations) and the Canadian ‘magic realist’ painter Alex Colville, whose occluded bodies in essentially intimate scenes can create a surprising sense of alienation. This partial view, the ‘privileged peep’, fits in with Kellerman’s particular aesthetic very well.