Norbert Guthier:

PHOTOGRAPHY | NORBERT GUTHIER       WORDS | CLIFFORD THURLOW

He does not stage-set moments of passion or arrange phony scenes where artfully placed nudes conceal the emptiness of their appearance. He leads us away from the usual perceptions of sexual imagery and what he presents in his photographs is truth.

Guthier sets out in his work to bridge the distance between the photographer's "cold mechanical eye" (his camera) and his "subjects." By becoming the soul-mate of the lovers, he reveals authentic narratives with genuine passion: love-stories visible for only a split second, even a hundredth-of-a-second-tales in which two people forget the photographer to immerse themselves in the empire of their senses.

The down-to-earth no-faking-it realism in his images are not the sole result of sophisticated craftsmanship, but evolve from the confidence the lovers have in the presence of the camera.

The result is intimate, whimsical, passionate, yet razor-sharp, wild and strong enough to atomize the borderline between the erotic and pornography: pictures that at first seem unbelievable, but stir us because they are sincere and totally real.

Some of Guthier's images will shock at first glimpse, but the more you look at them, the more they change in front of your mind's eye, appealing to our sense of aesthetics. His photographs are unfiltered, unretouched. They are proof that love and sex do not exclude each other.

Norbert Guthier is not an erotic adventurer, he is an explorer. He tries to uncover, as he puts it, "the veil of Isis and the ambiguity of sexual desire." His work is also an attempt to overcome the apathy of modern man and contains a firm objection to live in a world without love.

Unsurprisingly, outside nude photography, Guthier adores tropical rainforests, and works with several institutions to save this "breathtaking natural environment." Guthier studied at the Fachhochschule in Darmstadt, Germany, from 1978-1982 and has since been a full-time photographer. He lives and works mostly in Germany and Spain.

He has a number of books, most recently Kinky and Blissful, a hardcover edition published by Edition Olms, ISBN: 3283004226.