Kevin French Challenging Views on Nudity & Disability NSFW 18+
Kevin lives with Cerebral Palsy and is interested in challenging views about movement, nudity and disability. Those who know me know I’m not your average 27 year old, I too enjoy challenging views that are so often portrayed as ‘normal’ within our culture. (What does normal even mean?!) So when I found out about Kevin’s plan in working towards a Performance Training Master’s involving improvised dance, nudity, body image and non verbal communication I just knew I had to get in touch!
Kevin liked my work and asked if we could shoot together, he beat me to it! We arranged a shoot at Plymouth College of Art where Kevin is studying and we worked in a Photographic Studio there (which I must also mention was excellently equipped, clean and very professional! – Lucky students!)
We shot with a variety of backgrounds and I took my two strip softboxes as I had an idea of the images I wanted to create. I wanted the photos from this session to fit well within my project on art nude photography which aims to show how all body shapes and sizes can be beautiful through photography.
I also had Kevin’s work in mind so we got a good variety of full shots, close ups and emotive photos to suit both of our projects.
Kevin was absolutely brilliant when it came to moving and posing for the camera, he created fantastic shapes and really knew how to move his body for dramatic poses whilst working with the light. We took some photographs with and without his wheelchair for added variety and context.
When I asked about Kevin’s Project he gave me this write up to help illustrate his work:
“I will be undertaking a performance training masters involving improvised dance, nudity, body image and maybe non verbal communication.
I began to think about this 2 years ago because once a year I do an improvisational life drawing session at Plymouth College of Art. This began because some new first years were shocked by a nude disabled man, they would not suggest poses. I decided to use the “stop go” dance score from my BA dance training, where I moved until someone says stop, freeze and they draw that pose until someone says go. Within 30 minutes most of them were asking me questions and 2 of them went on to work with motion.
I wrote a proposal for an art festival which morphed in to a piece of potential research, which crystallised my area of exploration. The person that the proposal was written for, did not understand, how many fine art artists find disability and nudity challenging, two other people were enthused and one person felt really uncomfortable even reading my idea. I am really fascinated how people have multiple reactions to disability, movement and nudity, as well as finding these reactions are, often counterintuitive and this is what I plan to examine in my thesis.”
It was an honour to work with Kevin and I personally adore the photographs we created. I think many of these photographs would be beautiful printed as large gallery images and I will look at exhibiting the images from this project around Devon and Cornwall in the future.
We hope you enjoy looking through the images as much as we enjoyed taking them, please do leave a comment on the blog post below and tell us what you think.
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