Model Society

about Eric Kellerman

Male

Eric Kellerman is a Briton who has lived in the Netherlands for just over half his life. In 2008, he retired from academia to spend more time on photography. Specialising in the nude, he works almost entirely in the studio with a regular team of female collaborators, most of whom have a serious interest in movement (dance, acrobatics, yoga, martial arts). Sometimes, when nobody is available, he photographs vegetables and fruit out of desperation.

Kellerman likes to consider his work as distant, abstract, melancholic, ‘unerotic’, despite its subject matter. He emphasises line, geometrical form, texture, implicit movement, and above all, chiaroscuro. He tries 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 thinks he has been influenced by several painters, and admires the photographic work of Ruth Bernhard, Christian Coigny, Flor Garduño, Lynn Bianchi, Andreas Heumann, Sonja Rolton, and Emil Schildt, amongst many others.