In John Berger’s highly regarded book Ways of Seeing, he closed his chapter on the nude by posing a challenge: “Choose from this book an image of a traditional nude. Transform the woman into a man. Either in your mind’s eye or by drawing on the reproduction. Then notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer.”
It seems a simple experiment. Can we change white into black and black into white, flip the script and see it anew? It is what Berlin-based photographer Hani Hape has attempted to do in her new photographic series, Helmut Newton As Seen By Hani Hape, which features recreations of Newton’s famous – or infamous – overtly sexual photographs of female nudes, replacing them with images of men.
