Many of his models have a despondent quality; staring emptily into space, they look pathetically lost and vulnerable. One has a huge bruise on her thigh, another is pallid and skeletal, while the physique of a third makes her the helpless victim of gravity. Even so, these ‘poor’ all possess a kind of power; they seem to bear their suffering with a mixture of pride and resignation.
The portraits raise issues about identity. What is the nature of beauty and ugliness? Where does the dividing line lie between the external world and the inner life? At what point does the erotic become repugnant? Eder succeeds in making the fragility of his subjects painfully tangible without ever making the viewer a voyeur. Eder’s pictures are not pornographic because he never creates an atmosphere that deliberately involves the viewer in the situation. Despite the sometimes explicit poses of his models, the effect of the pictures is to make the viewer aware of the state of mind of the subject, rather than feel physically attracted to her.
The series is painterly in quality and evokes associations with seventeenth-century portrait painting. Loneliness, sexuality, mortality and desire are all bound up together in this challenging series of photographs to produce a commentary on the stylised and unreal depiction of the female body and the erotic in today’s world. The exhibition is the product of cooperation with the Kunsthalle Mannheim and is accompanied by a bilingual (German/English) catalogue entitled Martin Eder, Die Armen (Price €39.95).