FEARLESS, UNDISGUISED, TRUTHFUL
Gundula Schulze Eldowy’s concept of man

FEARLESS, UNDISGUISED, TRUTHFUL
Gundula Schulze Eldowy’s concept of man

An undressed man puts on a pair of underpants in a miserable room and looks shyly into the camera. A heavily pregnant woman stands naked in front of a piano, her posture and her quiet smile revealing pride and anticipation of what is to come. A frail, small man sits on a sofa bed with his legs apart wearing only slippers. Behind him on a shelf on the wall are numerous bottles of liquor, lined up like books. He doesn’t look at the camera, but stares at the floor, lost in thought. Lothar, as the man is called, is a simple labourer and one of the people that photographer Gundula Schulze Eldwoy, born in Erfurt in 1954, was able to to photograph naked during her forays through East Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden – people in the GDR were much less shy about nudity than in West Germany. The photograph of Lothar is one of the best-known images from Schulze Eldowy’s legendary series “Berlin on a Dog Night” (1977-1990) and at the same time one of the few nude photographs ever published or exhibited.
Saul Leiter took photos of his naked wife that are imbued with tenderness and intimacy. Nudes by Japanese photographers such as Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki deal with themes of the human condition – lust, violence, loneliness – and the naked body is often merely a means of staging these themes. Nan Goldin’s nudes are already marked at a young age by a life in which drugs play a significant role – Goldin’s photos shed light on a scene that deliberately eludes prying eyes and usually remains hidden.
Schulze Eldowy’s photographs do not refer to any particular scene, do not have any particular person as their subject and do not seek to symbolize or evoke anything in particular with the nudity of those depicted. The Images show a kinship to Boris Mikhailov’s blunt images, albeit without their often rude, aggressive note. They focus on the human body because it is the fundamental unit of everything that takes place in front of and behind the camera, and affects everyone without distinction: men, women, young, old, fat, thin, heterosexual, homosexual, healthy, sick. Which is why Schulze Eldowy shows them indiscriminately – but with anything but apathy. Having grown up in a state like the GDR, which paid unreserved homage to the collective, she energetically insists on the individual, who is in constant danger of having his rights restricted by politically and religiously motivated ideologies of all kinds and having to fight for his freedom as well as his place in society.
So it seems natural to take nude photos of people in a space where they can interact with themselves and others unobserved – not in a studio or in a specially arranged setting, but within their own four walls. It is no different in series such as “Der große und der kleine Schritt” than in the nude photos: just as naturally as people let Schulze Eldowy into operating theaters, factory halls and slaughterhouses, where she captures people’s often difficult everyday working lives, they let her into their homes, where she photographs their naked bodies undisguised.
Narratives such as “female gaze” or “body positivity”, which are omnipresent in thinking about the body today, seem too short-sighted in view of Schulze Eldowy’s images, which are about people in and of themselves. Thought constructs that get stuck on details where the photographer fearlessly focuses on the big picture. As a result, the photos are unspectacular and at the same time have a great impact, which is due to the immediacy and impartiality with which the artist and her models meet at eye level.
A photo shows a man lying on his back masturbating. He undoubtedly knows that the photographer is going to take a picture of him, but he has reached a point where he is only thinking about his orgasm and is subject to an increasingly intense, pleasurable tension.
This photo has nothing to do with the pictures that Robert Mapplethorpe or Peter Hujar took of naked men (often their lovers) holding their stiff penis in their hand, frozen in a pose like a nude model in a drawing class. Self-involved and at the mercy of the camera, they have become a sculpture of flesh and blood, shaped by the voyeurism of the photographer and the exhibitionism of the model.
Naturalness is not a worthwhile goal in such an artistic coordinate system, as it comes dangerously close to everyday life, from which most people who work artistically with nudity and – derived from this – with sexuality and eroticism actually want to escape.
Such artificiality is alien to Gundula Schulze Eldowy.
She does not shy away from anything, but approaches it directly and without fear and consciously accepts the possible consequences of such an approach – no wonder that she is under close observation by the Stasi from the very beginning and is lucky that the Wall falls immediately before the trial against her.
She documented without practicing documentary photography. She took nude portraits without nude photography playing a major role as a genre. The naturalness with which she can trust her instincts means that the people she photographs also trust them.
Liveliness and authenticity is what she looks for in her models and gives back to them with her photos, which in turn makes it easy for the people portrayed to say: Yes, that’s me.
A dark-haired, corpulent woman with protruding breasts and belly lies on a sofa – a photo that brings to mind Lucian Freud’s large-format paintings of “Big” Sue Tilly. Unlike Rubens, Freud was not interested in sensuality and opulence. In the mid-sixties, he developed a concept that he called “Naked Portrait” – to see and understand a person from their entire body. In doing so, he followed Rodin, of whom Rilke said that he had removed the mask of people’s faces, which stand for their social being, for what they represent, not what they are.
It is no different with Schulze Eldowy – her nude photographs are universally valid, truthful images of people, liberated from all masks of convention, all false shame and every pose or disguise.

Peter Truschner