Customer Reviews

Nudes (German Edition)

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Length:: 1:08 Mins

This book is such a wonderful coffee table book. it is clean, elegant and sexy at the same time.
the work is flawless, timeless, sculptural and worth being collected by book lovers. yes it should have it's place in every good book collection.
I'm glad I found it.
the photographers work is brilliant.

Blum takes almost a sculptural approach to her subjects. Each of her models appears as a structure: strong and symmetric, or curved and cantilevered, or elegantly arched. The model as sculpture comes through again in the many faces hidden by poses, or simply cropped. With their faces missing, those models seem somehow anonymous and even unreal, just a figure rather than a person with friends, family, wants, and hopes. The models as a group get their nod in the closing indicia, but rarely see their names attached to their images.

So, these B&W images present the simple curves and lines of the human animal. In particular, the female human, twenty-something, long and lean. The images are easy to enjoy, but more as a vehicle for Blum's vision than as a person to be documented. Conventional poses, for example the en pointe toes tightening muscles through the model's legs, also move her image away from her unique self. I see the value in idealization and abstraction of these very handsome figures, but that comes at a cost in the models' warmth and humanity.

-- wiredweird

This is a book of female nudes large in size as well as accomplishment. It might be Sylvie Blum's break through body of work. Dimension-wise it is a superbly satisfying 15x10" and features 140 pages of black & white prints. Ms. Blum herself, is a former model who now works as a photographer. She is also the widow of the greatly admired photographer, Günter Blum. Their time spent together was undoubtedly of artistic benefit to Sylvie, for the magnificent compositional skills that made Günter's work so memorable is strikingly evident in Sylvie's work too. Nonetheless, it's her background as a model along with the strength and fire of her own personality that have together been forged here into a fabulous new vision of the female form. And the manner with which she sees her subject matter here is framed with such creative abandon, such an overpowering sense of style and composition, it now seems she was truly born to take pictures. That she is such a beautiful woman may have prolonged this, she is such a natural in front of the camera, but it was perhaps inevitable that she would assume her place behind the lens - and this work solidifies the opinion that she belongs there.

The content for NUDES was shot on location in various locations in Berlin, Miami, Los Angeles, and the island of Majorca. Sylvie's vision of strong, beautiful women is the central tenet of this work, and is perhaps a reflection of her own personality as well as her personal quest to stand-out in a medium dominated by men in general and her late husband in particular. Be that as it may, Sylvie claims to have no need to escape from the shadows of anyone, including her beloved Günter, and this collection of work is glaring testimony to her amazing maturation as an artist with her own unique and powerful vision. Her alchemy of flesh and form, desert and ocean, the natural world and human architecture all combine to shape what is both a delicious perspective of the female body as well as the self-actualization of a sensational talent.