Family Nudes
The present book deals with the subject of intimacy. The photographs depict in an inimitable way that sense of trust developed between parents and their children, and just how normal it is to be close to each other, skin touching skin.
The pictures exude love: the perhaps greatest and deepest love developed by the parents for their children. Mother, fphotographs in full-colorather, the son and the daughter are all naked, because they revel in the beauty and the strength of their own bodies.
And because they realise that clothing is often something in which we hide ourselves in order to present what is in fact not us at all.
For this is the task of the portrait photographer: to depict the individuality of each person in the form of an image, to show a person’s strengths and weaknesses, and to allow an honest picture of each human being to be formed. As Thomas Aquinas might have put it: "Beauty is skin deep."
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Press comments and reviews
Photographer Ralf Mohr has succeeded in shooting unique family portraits. These photos are truly unique because daddy, mommy, son and daughter are all nude. The result is a thick album of family portraits which show love and naturalness with unprecedented intensity. (HERSFELDER ZEITUNG, Germany)
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Intimacy within the family, love and closeness: these are the themes of this volume of photos, which shows the natural trust between parents and children, the matter-of-factness of being close, also naked, skin to skin. The result: portraits full of individuality and strength. (FOCUS, Germany)
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Being naked here isn’t what it typically is ordinary nude photography – eroticism, posing, or even advertising. Here, nudity is an expression of intimacy, nearness and trust within the family. Some photos are very funny, for example, a mother’s breast spouting milk like a fountain or the peculiar surroundings in which some of the photos were taken. A gift for close and not-so-close friends with an unconventional sense of family life. (ÖSTERREICHISCHE HEBAMMENZEITUNG, Austria)
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Love isn’t something that one needs to learn. It’s simply there. But nowhere has the natural and unconditional love between parents and children been more convincingly depicted than here in Ralf Mohr’s photographs. (DAS MAGAZIN, Germany)
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One can truly speak of good fortune when mothers assert themselves so aesthetically, especially when they’re as beautiful as they are in Ralf Mohr’s Family Nudes. (SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, Germany)
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A fascinating gallery of parent-child portraits. (GENEREUX, France)
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Ralf Mohr spent three years photographing families in their own familiar habitats. In a fine and sensitive manner, Mohr’s pictures reveal the trust between parents and their children, although the people portrayed aren’t photo models, but simply ordinary family members. (PROFIFOTO, Germany)
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Foreword of this book
We are confronted with nakedness on a daily basis: breasts point at us from the tabloids; perfect bodies, 'sculpted' to perfection, are draped gracefully across any number of objects; and those given to extrovert tendencies - whatever their age - can cavort to their heart's desire in the largest shop window the world has ever known: the Internet. Naked flesh everywhere the eye cares to roam. Beckoning, helping increase the sales, but sterile somehow, surreal and remote.
The latest photographs by Ralf Mohr are different. The people in his pictures exude a natural aura; they do not possess the perfect body of the model, and coming across these individuals in the state nature intended is a perfectly normal occurrence. At least within the most trusted environment we possess: the family. Mother, father, the son and the daughter are all naked, because they revel in the beauty and the strength of their own bodies. They realise too that clothing is often something in which we hide ourselves in order to present what is in fact not us at all. But also because they can learn something most intimate, through the largest organ of the senses possessed by the human body - the skin. The present book deals with the subject of intimacy. The photographs depict in an inimitable way that sense of trust developed between parents and their children, and just how normal it is to be close to each other, skin touching skin. Not like a pair of lovers, but in love nonetheless. The pictures exude love: the perhaps greatest and deepest love developed by the parents for their children. The love which knows no bounds of young children for father and mother. And the kind of love coloured by recognition that exists between older siblings and their parents, a love that for many years was put to the test and sometimes well beyond, but one that can ripen and change.
This is a book about respect. In the first place it concerns the respect of parents for their children, who have learned to trust them in return. But also about respect for the wonder that is life, a phenomenon that for nine whole months is lived out in the mother's womb and which, with a baby's 'arrival' in the world, changes forever the lives of the parents.
When we look at the people depicted in Ralf Mohr's photographs we realise that nakedness does not end with the suckling babe. Just as we are aware that parents have, in their own children, the very best example of how wonderful it is to be able to experience in a state of nakedness feelings of freedom, abandon and tenderness. Babies filter their experiences from the environment maninly through the skin. It is perhaps this enviable talent that calls forth in us parents those feelings of sensitivity that go far beyond a merely erotic response: the sensual experience of warmth, protectedness and basic trust. The fact remains that it is much better to orient ourselves to these childhood precepts of shameless nakedness, before we don the mantle of sin and suffer guilt before a gallery of prudes.
This discrepancy between naturalness and resistance when we are confronted with nakedness is the focus of interest in Ralf Mohr's work, and what drew him to the family as a subject. In his first book Pregnant, he depicted women who had gone forth to multiply and were strong, proud and beautiful. And independent too. Pictures with two women, a friend, a sister, other pregnant women were seldom. In the present publication Family Nudes there are more people in the frame, and they exhibit another factor: contact. Sometimes earthy, occasionally intellectual, at times cool and at others wildly extravagant, the images are always delicate, and call forth mutual sentiments of engagement.
For three years, Ralf Mohr photographed these families in their own homes. He had no preconceived ideas of the kind of pictures he wished to produce. He simply allowed himself the luxury of the chance meeting, time and time again, a strategy that paid off in the end because a certain trust had been developed. He persevered slowly, and gave the participants every opportunity to behave as they normally would do within the given environment. What comes across is a sense of naturalness, and we are given the chance to gaze deeply into the soul of these 'players'.
For this is the task of the portrait photographer: to depict the individuality of each person in the form of an image, to show a person's strengths and weaknesses, and to allow an honest picture of each human being to be formed. As Thomas Aquinas might have put it: "Beauty is skin deep."
Robert Anthony
