Photographer Florian Hetz wants to abolish artist statements

15th January 2024, 12:50 pm

I have a tattoo on my arm that says “Property of Florian Hetz,” and I’m not joking. Hetz and I had both been Artists-in-Residence at Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, and though our residencies didn’t overlap, Hetz came to one of my band’s concerts in L.A. and we got to shoot the shit and become homies. I ended up in one of his photo shoots in a hotel downtown, and I remember sitting at the end of his shutter feeling like a form of hallmark. I knew his work, but like, who was he? As far as personal mythology goes, he suffered a form of brain trauma in the past—don’t fret, he’s safe now—though at the time it would randomly cause lapses in his short-term memory. So he began photo-documentary as a form of visual timeline to keep the blur between past and recent present manageable.

He does boast more traditional work that lends itself to portraiture, or what I like to call “ho pics.” Speaking of ho’s, there are a lot of them on the internet these days. And as we watch beautiful, fit, muscular bodies blend into one note, there is something that deeply enamors me about Hetz’s work. They’re his “anonymous” photos, the ones that lack a face conveying or emoting. With portraiture, that’s what we rely on to understand how to “feel” about a subject, but oftentimes his photos don’t attach a face or even an entire body. In close up, you understand them more: a tip of a clenched elbow turned sides, or an Adam’s apple being gripped tight from behind with a hand, or beads of sweat accumulating on the small of someone’s back. Objectification, simply stated, is the depersonalization of a subject. Hetz’s work is an elevated form of objectification, based in an abstractionist lens. More often than not, the effect is poetic. An elbow wrapped in another looks for foreign until I realize what I’m looking at.

Lately, Hetz is wrapped in a community internet battle around his images and whether or not they constitute obscenity. But, true to form, he’s now selling the images to pay the court fees, like a true Renaissance man with the IQ of a goddamn criminal. I always have to change my panties after interviewing him.

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Meet Florian Hetz, artist-in-residence

“After having lost so much of my memory, I am creating madeleine moments with my photographic work for myself and for the viewer, to activate long lost or... View Article