Ruben Brulat hasn’t been a photographer long; the French artist picked up his first camera just two years ago. But since then, he’s been exploring what it means to be a human and how we interact with our environment. His series “Primates” places him – both as photographer and as subject – in inhospitable terrains to contrast the vulnerability of the human body with the stark roughness of nature.
The photographs in the “Primate” series are all nudes, and they all feature the photographer himself as the subject. His naked body is placed carefully in the landscape, at once a part of it and an obviously misplaced object among the rocks, grass, snow or water. By placing a human into these natural settings, Brulat hopes to show that we are all connected to the planet on which we live.
But the focus of the photographs isn’t the artist’s body at all; rather, it is the relationship between the relatively small, vulnerable human form and the immense, emotionless backdrop. In some of the photos, the subject isn’t immediately identifiable and one must spend a moment searching for the body tucked away in the landscape. In others, the body is immediately visible and seems to be in danger – or at least in an environment in which one should not be nude.
In stripping his body of clothing and avoiding in the photographs of any sign of human developments, Brulat is bringing the entire human species to the same level as any other type of animal. He rids us of the need for modern trappings and displays the soft, tender, beautiful being that resides in us all. The asexual presence of a small body in these vast landscapes is alarming at first, but becomes almost comforting if we shift slightly from thinking of this body as stranded and lifeless to thinking of this body as being at home in its habitat.
