Klaus Kampert:
An Act of Balance

WORDS | ANDREW KAISER

Look at the images of Klaus Kampert and you’d never know he is a self-taught photographer. So crisp and clear is his vision and so flawless its execution, one could easily compare him to the likes of Helmut Newton or Imogen Cunningham. Not bad for a man who learned the rules of his craft without the benefit of formal instruction.

A freelancer in Duesseldorf, Germany, Kampert started his own business in 1981 creating photographs for high end advertising clients, fashion executives, and private commissioned portraits. His most passionate work however has always been the nude. He rose to fame in the art world for taking striking images of nude ballet-dancers, emphasizing both the elegant and extreme physical prowess of bodies moving to the rhythm of music.

Kampert’s straight nudes are perhaps less human, but no less powerful. Here he creates an intimate kinship between the grace of the nude figure and the simplicity of basic geometry. His models are for the most part faceless, choosing instead to speak louder with their contorted poses set within or against circles, squares, and simple lines. Sometimes their bodies mimic these shapes, other times they stand in direct opposition as if struggling to break free of their confinement.

Euclid, the Greek father of geometry once surmised, “Things equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.” This observation is the visual key to the nudes of Klaus Kampert. The body is after all just a series of uniform shapes connected together – a natural blueprint that can apply to all things made of flesh or stone.

When a young artist learns to draw or paint they are encouraged to start on the body by making a series of lines and circles that will eventually shape itself into a perfect form. Even the great master Leonardo Da Vinci visually defined this concept in A Study of Proportions, the infamous piece of a perfect man inhabiting the inside of a perfect circle. Klaus Kampert is simply taking and age old truth in depicting the human figure and applying it to the modern medium of photography.

The work of Klaus Kampert has appeared in several international publications including Feierabend’s The Body: The Finest Collection of Esthetic Nude Art Photography as well as the Graphis 2003 Photo Annual – two publications which many editors and art collectors look to as the literal “who’s who” of the fine art photographic nude. To say Klaus Kampert is an up and coming photographer is an understatement; he is already here and doesn’t plan on going anywhere.