Nick Widmer

Awarded

Nick Widmer

Various projects in fashion photography

Photography

Jury report

Off-key Fashion Photographed with Ease
How can a pho­tog­ra­pher be free in his work while at the same time work­ing for oth­ers? The pho­tog­ra­pher Nick Wid­mer from Zurich no longer has to bend over back­wards to get con­tract work. In­stead, he is now able to use his own per­sonal vi­sual lan­guage which can also be found in the work he does purely for his own en­joy­ment. In his prepa­ra­tion of mod­els for fash­ion shoot­ings, he looks for a suit­able pic­to­r­ial lan­guage for the col­lec­tions of the fash­ion de­sign­ers; for ex­am­ple, for the men's col­lec­tions by Joy Ahoulou. Ahoulou's cre­ations are ex­tremely colour­ful, the cuts ex­trav­a­gant and the look over­all bor­der­ing on cos­tumes. To cre­ate them, Nick Wid­mer goes to a gravel pit where he finds a be­fit­ting set­ting that gives space to the col­lec­tions. Or else he pho­tographs the mod­els in sim­ple apart­ments de­void of any glam­our what­so­ever. Or he takes pic­tures of them in the for­est or at non-lo­ca­tions such as pedes­trian un­der­passes. Over­all, the pho­tographs have an ease and pleas­ant 'minor mat­ter feel' about them, and, in a re­fresh­ing way, they set them­selves apart from the usu­ally very styl­ish fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy. In his non-com­mis­sioned works, Nick Wid­mer ex­plores de­tails, pho­tographs an African sculp­ture on a chest of draw­ers, or tus­sling cats. Other pic­tures are snap­shots of his sur­round­ings: a rock mu­si­cian in leather pants and his body ex­posed lies ex­hausted on the floor; a young man sleeps peace­fully, snugly tucked be­tween pil­low and duvet. Like the fash­ion shoots, the pho­tos are agree­ably re­laxed and come across as au­then­tic. Nick Wid­mer col­lects such im­ages and com­piles them for ex­hi­bi­tions and pub­li­ca­tions. A first artist's book 'Vol­ume One' has been re­leased by the pho­tog­ra­pher's own pub­lish­ing house. Hav­ing com­pleted his pho­tog­ra­phy train­ing at ZHdK, the pho­to­graphic artist de­scribes his non-com­mis­sioned works as 'sto­ries on the bor­der be­tween re­port and fic­tion'. He ex­plains that each pic­ture has a spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance for him, as Nick Wid­mer puts it: it must be cred­i­ble and beau­ti­ful when viewed on its own and al­ways work as a 'con­sol­i­da­tion of some­thing ac­tu­ally felt'.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Nick Widmer
Born in
1976
Education
Photographer