Natural Selection:
A Glimpse into the Future

WORDS | LUCY CAVENDISH       PHOTO | PETTER HEGRE

THERE IS SOMETHING of the Viking in Petter Hegre, though his weapon is not the broadsword, but the camera, and studying his work, you begin to wonder if he was born with a pair of viewfinders where his eyes should have been. At 34, he can't remember a time when he wasn't taking pictures, a passion that has developed into a unique and instantly recognizable style.

After studying in California and serving an apprenticeship with Richard Avedon in New York, Hegre was drawn to the aesthetics of the female nude at a time when fashion had made the subject a counterfeit image; rather than intimate or sensual, he saw the form growing ever more perverse and banal. Hegre set out to counter this with his own pure lines and natural representations, the work he displayed in galleries, books and latterly over the Internet, an emphatic declaration of intent.

In our image-saturated times, much of our experience is uncertain and second-hand. Images are manipulated, and photographic art with its botoxed and gelled goddesses has lost its way in the shadowy world of manufactured perfection. Only the power of art and nature truly inspire awe, and Petter Hegre strives to combine these forces in photographs of such naturalism, we can almost glimpse the third dimension in a two dimensional source.

There is always a time for moving on. The Cubists pulled down the walls of the Impressionists, as in turn Surrealism would evolve through time into the artifice of Abstract Impressionism. Under the same post-modern influence, photographers have coldly presented a plastic and packaged representation of the nude figure, something artificial and vaguely disturbing.

But the wheel of evolution is turning again. Petter Hegre is, in his own way, an iconoclast, a mediaeval knight stirring the stodgy photographic world from its silicone torpor to present here in THE NEW NUDE images that are moving, memorable, sometimes humorous, haunting and always deeply sensuous, a new vision that takes the new nude into the mainstream, where she belongs.