Eric Nehr's photographs show a series of half length portraits of young people met in the street and photographed in a studio. Each of them is before a painted, monochrome, background of different colours. The light gently shapes the faces, the necks, the shoulders, casting no shadow, not showing where it comes from either. The very beautiful, very bright prints express the true dimension of the slightly blurred faces which of course are not for all that pixellized.
Around 1855 - 1860, when Nadar achieves his famous portraits of artists and politicians, drawing his inspiration from Rembrandt, with mastery he enacts the rules of a photographic manner destined to a brilliant future. The use of chiaroscuro, dark backgrounds, divine stares revealing the psychology of these celebrities, a tendency to archetypes, all these means have been used ever since with success by great studios such as Harcourt.
Eric Nehr clearly keeps his distance with regard to this classic attitude. In order to understand his photographs in their truth it is better to approach them by what is around. The painted backgrounds which have been numerized remind us of the range of colours offered by computers. The faces then seem to have been stuck, added ; the coloured code no longer evokes particular psychology, the subject and the background are apart. The busts do not appear completely, they are often blurred, therefore emphasizing the feeling of transparent bodies. The necks are stretched, but also twisted so that faces turn toward us. Necks and busts show the strains and the frailties which faces do not express. They are absent, a little indifferent, with vacant stares, sometimes catching our eyes without actually looking. All these anonymous people seem overwhelmed by necessities and collective desires the motivations of which they fail to see, those of the vitual world and those of fashion.
Halfway between distance and proximity, our relation with these pictures changes : when from afar we see a portrait in its unity, at close range the results of numerized printing put us back at a distance. The experience we live with our senses is no longer sure, what the virtual world of computers is reponsible for. If with the outcome of media experience and knowledge of the world do not coincide in our consciences, the virtual world no longer ensures a link between experience and reality.
Eric Nehr's photographs waver between these two perceptions in a significant way.
In the nineties fashion has been taken for granted in the artistic field in an extraordinary way. The new stars now are models rather than Hollywood film stars. Fashion because it enforces simplified archetyped and conditioning on our perception creates a stereotyped vision of the human body. Eric Nehr's beings seem to be moved by that, by the wish to conform to what is necessary to look like to be seen. They do not so much try to appeal to us thanks to the photographs of them as to be, at least once in their lives, fashion pictures. The artistic field is affected by that. Eric Nehr cleverly uses the portrait as a manner inherited from the arts to mean how reducing the encounter with fashion can be.
The value of Eric Nehr's work is there. Computor aesthetics and that of the fashion model's body cast on these anonymous beings show them tense and made fragile by this double wish : to conform to what has become for a whole generation the only way to assert oneself collectively through a stereotyped fancy, and to be present in the world in their entire singularity.

Philippe Bazin
November 1998