Awarded
Thomas Weisskopf
Two photo researches 'Tide' and 'Cut'
Photography
Thomas Weisskopf
Thomas Weisskopf
Jury report
Individuals or typologies?
How 'individually' can 'exotic' people be shown in photographs? The Zurich-trained photographer Thomas Weisskopf, who has already won awards twice in the Swiss National Design Competition, has taken this theme up in two series of photographs. He photographed over 100 Buddhist monks and nuns over a period of several years in Thailand for the long-term 'Tide' project. Each of these subjects, photographed in black and white, from the 11-year-old to the 75-year-old, is shown in an identical pose against a neutral background. Their hands are folded in a gesture of greeting, they are looking straight at the camera. Are these individual portraits, or does typology predominate? Does the photograph capture the individual, or is the monks' and nuns' collective in the foreground? Do these photographs benefit from the cliché that exotic faces are more stereotypical than familiar ones? Photographs like these, reminiscent of the typological work of a photographer like August Sander, ask questions like that. But they do not give unambiguous answers.
One theme that runs through Thomas Weisskopf's photographic output like a thread is the portrait. This is also skilfully demonstrated in his 'Cut' series of coloured photographs. These show people moving between insistent individuality and a desired collective ideal. Various individuals are photographed identically: with naked torsos, showing only the top of the breasts. Here again the subjects are looking straight at the camera, though somewhat stonily this time. The photographs of the monks exude peace and tranquillity, but here we are struck by the heavily made-up lips and eyes, going almost too far towards an image of perfect femininity. The title may sound confusing at first: 'cut' can be a verb, an adjective and a noun in English. But translated into the transsexual milieu it describes the surgical operation that removes the part of the body that makes it masculine. These portraits are left in the field of tension between an individual personality and the longing for standardized femininity, exaggerated towards the doll-like, which gives them their particular charm.
Peter Stohler
Biography
Thomas Weisskopf
Born in
1969
Education
Fotograf
also in
