Girls Seen

“Girls Seen is an exploration in another regard. If you consider the photos as a series, the paramount impression is that you are facing a large archive. In their arrangement, a large number of the portrait carry some of the photographic aspects common to scientific or bureaucratic images, such as the ones we are familiar with in the fields of medicine and the legal system, but also in ethnology, or in 19th and 20th century colonial photography.

This becomes blatantly apparent in the series of knee parts, for which the models sit on a chair, half-naked or dressed as described earlier. Sitting in profile they adopt stiff upright positions as if fixed. The same effect is produced when the model naked except for a black nylon slip and Doc Martens looks into the camera.
It cannot be expressed differently: such arrangements relating to the anthropometric aspects used in photographic records enter into a disturbing alliance with the fetishist disposition. Here, the model is captured, though only for a single sitting, while the photographer subjects himself to the austere photographic setting over a period of many years. Like a castigation.

Thomas Hauser’s portraits are light years away from the omnipresent and transient pictorial environment prevailing around us. They are also far removed from the photographic idea of another, lighter, more liberated (?) attitude towards the physical. In the manner in which they are able to create immediacy and captivate the viewer, they are masterful.”

Extract from the foreword by Annette Weber.